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Has anyone produced any hard evidence that injuries really are on the rise? Because if not, then anecdotal evidence can be pretty easily explained by a) increased roster sizes, and b) greater access to information now that every team's practices are being tweeted in real time and injuries are being posted to threads like this one.
The NFL’s injury surveillance data, courtesy of Edgeworth Economics, shows a slow upward trend in the total number of injuries sustained in all practices and games from 2004 (2,623) to 2012 (3,126); a spike of 4,493 injuries in 2011 was attributed mainly to greater reporting of minor injuries that season. The data also shows a steady annual increase in the number of injuries that require surgery and those that result in eight or more days of missed playing time.
2013: Year of the Injury? | MMQB | SI.com
Also interesting (IMO) from that piece:
West says that studies show about 70 percent of ACL tears result from non-contact injuries; our unofficial sample, showing 75 percent non-contact injuries, is on par with that figure.