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

  • mill_about_smartly@alien.topBEnglish
    1·
    1 year ago

    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.

    • Evissi@alien.topBEnglish
      1·
      1 year ago

      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.