Thread by @Chris_Jarmon

#Broncos fans are concerned about the number of injuries this season, and people are getting out their pitchforks to go scapegoat hunting. A popular choice seems to be Strength & Conditioning coach Loren Landow, with the ridiculous #FireLandow hashtag floating around. (cont'd)

Strength and Conditioning (S&C) coaches are responsible for the team's physical training, so a high injury rate would mean they are bad at their jobs, right?

NO. This is an incorrect assumption and I'll explain why.

An educational 🧵

For starters, let's get the obvious out of the way: football is an incredibly violent sport that places impossible demands on players' bodies. NFL players are amazingly strong, but human tissue (muscle, bone, ligaments) can only withstand a certain level of physical force

When your leg gets rolled up in a pile, doesn't matter how hard and smart you trained in the offseason. If the force applied on your ACL is great enough, it will rupture. Tendons and muscles can get stronger from resistance training, but ligaments are basically just there as is

Injuries heal, but the increased likelihood of reinjury remains -- regardless of how much "prehab" work you do to bulletproof against it.

Even if a player were to get EXACTLY the training he needs, there's still an elevated risk

The same goes for soft tissue. Over the last decade nearly 40% of hamstring injuries were recurrent (player had injured a hamstring previously and then reinjured it).
Risk factors include how recently hamstring was injured and years playing in the league
pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34878369/

This makes each player's injury history a crucial factor. These guys aren't walking onto the NFL Draft stage in mint condition, having had zero injuries in their playing career. Most of them have been playing football for at least 5 years, sometimes 10+

Players drafted into the NFL with a prior ACL reconstruction surgery in college are significantly more likely to tear their ACL again in the NFL. If you're coaching a player who tore his ACL in college and he re-tears his ACL, how much of that is on you?
journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/23…

Time is another big factor. College players train with their S&C staff year-round. They're expected to be on campus all summer for the team's offseason program.
NFL doesn't work like this. Players are only required to work with their team's S&C coaches ~6 months out of the year

If you only get to work with a player for half the year, for all you know he could be doing dumb stuff on his own (or nothing at all) for the other 6 months that actually increases rather than decreases likelihood of getting injured during the season

This is arguably why we saw injury rates start to take off in the years after the NFL/NFLPA 2011 Collective Bargaining Agreement. Part of the CBA deal included a reduction in time players are required to spend at the facility as well as limiting training/practice time

The change in CBA rules “...gives players more time on their own during the critical preconditioning time before training camp. Some players may be more diligent about their diet, fitness, and conditioning during that time than others” said Jene Bramel, MD
lermagazine.com/news/in-the-mo…

Next up we have a bunch of other, more random and bizarre factors that can influence injury probability in a given situation

For example, weather can impact injuries. Research shows that ankle injuries and concussions are both significantly more likely to occur in NFL games played at temps colder than 50°, compared to games 70° or warmer

journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.11…

Interestingly, in that same study the researchers also found that shoulder injuries are significantly more likely to occur on a grass surface than on an artificial surface. Why? Who knows! Researchers sure don't, at least not yet 🤷🏻‍♂️

Meanwhile, several studies have found that concussions, hamstring strains, and shoulder injuries are more likely to occur on passing plays than rushing plays.
Runs, however, carry a higher risk of fibula fractures than passes do. Once again, 🤷🏻‍♂️

researchgate.net/profile/Jonath…

Position apparently matters too: defensive players are significantly more likely to rupture their Achilles tendon than offensive players.
These injuries are also significantly more likely in the first 8 games of the season

doi.org/10.1080/009138…

This thread isn't here to explain any Broncos injuries. The point is:
- A player's injury risk at any given moment is constantly fluctuating according to a long list of risk factors,
which range in level of impact
- Hard to know which one is most responsible for a specific injury

Here's the big things a team's performance staff (athletic trainers, S&C coaches, nutritionists etc.) CAN affect to decrease likelihood of injury:
- Training volume and intensity (how much / how heavy)
- Recovery (nutrition, sleep etc.)
- Practice workload (ultimately HC's call)

The problem is that while executing all of these things well as a performance staff reduces the odds of injury, it's impossible to know for sure how much the odds have been reduced.
When so many things factor into injury risk, how do you parse out the % effect of just one thing?

We can't run a play through some algorithm and say "this player would've had a 0.22% likelihood of spraining his ankle on that jump cut, but thanks to our performance staff's work it's now only a 0.08% likelihood." Could be true, but we have no way of evaluating or quantifying it

But let's pretend for a minute that these things could be measured. You're a NFL S&C coach, and your brilliant work has reduced a player's injury risk by, say, half. They are now half as likely to get hurt as they were before. Pretty good, right?

Well, what if their original probability of that injury was 80%? You've made them significantly less likely to get hurt, but they're still at super high risk. If they do get injured, does that mean you weren't doing your job?

Most casual Broncos fans don't know this, but Loren Landow is a legendary figure in his profession. There's a reason Denver has kept him as their S&C coach through three head coaches (Joseph, Fangio, Hackett): the guy is phenomenal at his job

He's been training tons of NFL players for well over 2 decades. During the 2011 lockout, team captain Brian Dawkins made Landow the Broncos' de facto strength coach. It made sense since most of the guys were training with Landow already

Landow was hired in 2018 when Luke Richesson left Denver for Houston. It was later reported that the Broncos had received calls from 20 veteran players who'd trained with Landow, all strongly pushing for Denver to hire him

broncoswire.usatoday.com/2019/01/13/den…

He's widely known in the S&C field as an expert on topics like strength + power training, return to sport from injury, &athletic movement skills.
Listen to a couple minutes of this episode if you want to get a better feel for his speed/agility philosophy:

In summary: NFL injury rates involve such a massively complex/random combo of factors that it can't be a reliable indicator of how well a Strength & Conditioning staff is doing their job. Loren Landow and his staff are excellent. Sometimes you just have crappy luck.
End of 🧵