zydecochris
2nd Team Getting Their First Start
- Joined
- Mar 11, 2007
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It's the gambler's fallacy -- trying to find a pattern in random events. For his first few seasons, people remarked on the reckless way Gronk played (somersaulting on his neck) and how it was a miracle he wasn't injured more often. Now he's had a bad run and people assume that it will continue.
Let's separate things. Tedy B seemed to escape injury by being very flexible for a big, strong guy. It's not clear that Gronk will continue to be that as he gets older (he needs to train with Alex Guerrero). Still, there's no reason to think that he'll be struck by lightning again.
Mike, I thought this post was one of the more thought provoking posts I have seen recently (and your very interesting comments on the gambler's fallacy have led me to some other trains of thought I won't go into here). What is the real reason that someone like Gronk (or someone else labeled injury prone) gets injured more often than usual?
Option 1: For either Gronk (although he wasn't injured much early on) or some other so-called "injury prone" player, is it because of his style of play, having some type of particularly injury prone body, or just the result of accumulation of injuries or surgeries? As other posters have pointed out, he does have a certain reckless style of play. That is almost certainly a part of the puzzle, some players are just more flexible (like your example of Tedy B.) and some just seem to have a knack for avoiding the big hit (like E. Smith years ago).
Option 2: Or, is it just "bad luck"? Let's do a little "thought experiment" (in honor of the "Gedanken experiments" of the late, great Albert Einstein). Suppose that to save costs the NFL made 1696 clones of one player, so that exactly the same player was playing every position for every team, and each one played the same number of snaps. Suppose also that the average number of injuries per player per year in this new league was 4. Would that mean that every one of those identical players would have 4 injuries per year? Of course not! There would be a statistical distribution centered around 4 injuries, with some of these identical players having much fewer injuries and some much more, just due to statistical odds. If one averaged over 3-4 years, there would still be some identical players with no injuries (just due to statistical "good luck") and some that were injured constantly (due to statistical "bad luck").
So: is the explanation for an often injured player Option 1 or Option 2? Beats me, I'll leave that for smarter people than me (which includes most people on this forum when it comes to football), it is easier to pose questions than to answer them.
....However, if I had to guess, it would be that it is some type of complicated combination of the two.
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