So does Amendola have weak collarbones, Vereen have a weak wrist, and Gronk have weak ankle ligaments?
I'm not arguing that there's no such thing as being injury prone. Certain players are definitely more predisposed to certain injuries than others. I'd say it's safe to say that Gronk's back will always be a bit of a risk for re-injury. There are NFL players that have had three torn ACLs. I'd say there's definitely something wrong with their knees or another body part that affects the knees. I firmly believe that Mankins' ankle and calf injuries last season were a direct result of compensating for a recovering knee after ACL surgery.
What bugs me is that the majority of fans don't draw the line between correlations of injuries based on the actual injuries that happened, but rather based on the quantity of injuries. Nobody cares that Jerod Mayo sprained his MCL twice in three seasons, but people are very quick to use lower body muscle sprains to predict upper body broken bones in hindsight and vice versa.
But even that isn't consistent from player to player. In a recent two year span, a certain player had a high ankle sprain, a torn ACL, three broken ribs, and a broken finger. Any player other than Tom Brady, and that player is made out of glass according to fans. Since he's Tom Brady, nobody argues that he's injury prone or that those injuries are at all related. It's not like playing quarterback means anything, because outside of the ankle sprain late in the 2007 season that the team successfully told nobody anything about, we know that all of those injuries were caused by contact, and since football is a game that involves a lot of contact, people expect that football players can remain healthy despite plenty of contact.
So basically, this doesn't come down to Amendola or Vereen or any other given player (although I think those two are great examples). It's the idea that makes no sense to me.
[Posted before Ian's post. If this isn't where you want the thread going, feel free to delete. I have it saved for the next time this conversation inevitably comes up directly. ]