Four consequences of the Detroit Lions new level of physicality
By Ash Thompson
Practice is not where injuries occur
The more physical brand of practice would seem to open the players to more injury risk. If we assume that Patricia’s more physical brand of practice is imported from New England, then there should be an increased level of player injury from the Patriots compared to the Lions over the Caldwell era.
That kind of information is somewhat difficult to quantify. It is made even moreso by the fact that the Lions and Patriots have been two of the most secretive organizations in the NFL when it comes to their players’ health. For example, the Patriots are known for listing Tom Brady as probable with a shoulder injury for most of his career.
The only reliable iron clad information is how many players ended up on injured reserve. There is no faking an ACL tear or a broken leg that costs the player a year of his brief career. But during the four seasons of the Jim Caldwell era in Detroit, the two teams put an identical number of players on injured reserve.
There is scholarly evidence leaning in the direction that these more physical practices are likely to cause more injuries though. In this study published in the Journal of Athletic Training tells us that it is game situations that result in injuries and not practices.
It stands to reason then that simulating game conditions should result in more injuries, but a deeper read of the study points away from that. The rates of injury from 1988-2004 did not significantly change. Patricia’s “physical practices” would have been considered unforgivably soft in 1988. The Oklahoma drill that caused such uproar among the assembled media and fans was considered standard practice in the 1980s. It was a warm-up for other, more physical drills.
There appears to be significantly more scholarly work on mathematical probabilities as they relate to betting than injury probabilities in academia. The idea that more injuries will occur in more physical practices makes sense anecdotally, but the statistics that have been gathered do not really bear that out over time.