Maybe someone smarter than me can interpret this, because I’m not understanding how they came to their conclusion. According to this study, the average number of injuries during Sunday games was 21.4 compared to Thursday games at 21.7 but the difference is “negligible”. I feel like they didn’t take into account the fact only one game is played on fewer Thursdays, as opposed to the majority of games taking place every Sunday.
Link to study: http://www.fortunejournals.com/articles/the-effect-of-thursday-night-football-on-injuries-in.pdf
The Thursday injury thing is all confirmation bias. People always jump to it when someone gets injured on a Thursday but don’t say anything when someone gets hurt on a Sunday or Monday.
The fact is that football is a violent sport and players will get injured.
I think over time, it has actually averaged out, but about 6 years ago, an article came out that Thursday games have the least amount of injuries per game. A Sunday game after a bye, meaning the maximum amount of rest, had the most injuries.
The paper in the OP cites this paper which has been my benchmark for a while on the level of “science” going into studies around Thursday night football and injuries.
Somebody posted a critique of that article where he highlighted two issues. The author replied to that critique basically saying “yeah you’re totally right, my bad” but I don’t think ever corrected the original paper? Anyways, the two issues were:
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He miscalculated a statistical ratio. This is kind of damning for a study purporting to be statistical in nature, but whatever that’s kind of boring to most people.
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For the second, much more interesting issue, I will just quote the critique:
Second, it is also worth noting that there is an explanation for why we might observe a lower reported injury rate on Thursdays even though it is implausible that shorter rest exerts a protective effect. It is a quirk of the way the timing of NFL injury reports work [Citation2]. Teams typically issue their first injury reports on Wednesday of each week: 3 days after a Sunday game but 6 days after a Thursday game. Any injury that resolves to the point the player can fully practice in that 3–6 day period would not be reported if it occurred on a Thursday but would be reported if it occurred on a Sunday. If 20% of reportable injuries resolve in that period, that would fully explain the lower Thursday injury rate.
That’s interesting for explaining a slightly lower difference, but I think the big takeaway is that they’re roughly equal. The claim has been that short weeks clearly and obviously lead to more injuries, and it seems like this shows that’s simply not the case.
Maybe it has a cumulative effect, like if teams played 7-8 games a year on short rest while others only played 1-2, but that doesn’t happen, and there’s no way to measure it because they’ve mostly balanced the Mon/Thurs games.
I agree that thursday is not a big issue for injuries the way people act like it is.
On the second point, there actually ISNT a good balance and it’s continuously gotten worse over the last decade or so. Teams are getting in more and more extreme cases of how many days they have between games compared to their opponent. Giants have -9 net rest days. SF is at -20 on the season, while teams like the Jets, Washington and Chicago are all +12.
Washington gets, effectively, more than an entire day of rest between games on average compared to the giants. Giants have 5 games where they get less rest than their opponent, and 3 games with more. Washington gets 5 games with more, and only 1 with less.
Giants salary cap % out for the season this year is at ~22-23%, and washington is at ~7-8%. WAS has also slightly overperformed this year compared to the giants underperforming.
Despite the schedule being completely mappable years in advance, they honestly do a terrible fucking job putting it together, especially in regards to thursday games.
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20 injuries per game? Is a scrape counted in this?
In manufacturing we have separate injury categories to differentiate between minor and major injuries. How many dafw injuries happen per game?;
injury rate is an important factor of course, but not the only one. players and teams have to make adjustments to how they play on a short week. these adjustments are an intangible, yet may impact the situation greatly. all i’m saying is, don’t just look at the injury rates and say, nah thursday is fine. just the eye test alone on thursday games warrants those games a closer look. the games traditionally lack the overall skill level, we’ve all seen it, some players just don’t look as sharp. perhaps they are guarding against injury or a previous lingering injury more, which then may ironically be more dangerous at times, especially when other players are playing full speed ahead. many factors about the short week need to be considered.
forget the data, use the eye test
no
yes
>games traditionally lack the overall skill level, we’ve all seen it, some players just don’t look as sharp
I think this is more from everyone getting a TNF game now and not just the best-rated teams. There are bad games going on Sunday at noon all the time, but nobody’s paying attention because there’s 5 other games going on. If the teams are good (higher skill, better disciplined) they’re probably not playing on Sunday noon as often.
Awkward tackling aside, that field looked sketchy. So many guys seemed to have issues with planting their feet or properly getting down when sliding.