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official_techsupport  who/whom  2yr ago (text post)   2985 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for September 09, 2022

We don't have the bot, so let me step in: this thread is not for serious in depth discussion of weighty topics, this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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I have a Fantasy Football/Medical question, not sure if there are a lot of football fans here but I think it’d be hard to get anything insightful from this in a sports forum.

My question is regarding the concept of “mileage” on athletes, which mostly comes up in the context of NFL running backs but sometimes is used in other sports. The idea is that there’s a sort of limited number of times you can expect someone to run a football before the “wear and tear” leads to more accumulated injuries and thus a quick decline in athletic ability. This is trivially true in the sense that all players will decline in athletic ability with age eventually, and you can only carry the ball more times and accumulate more injuries, so these things will all be correlated to some extent. Running backs in particular seem to suddenly drop off a cliff in performance rather than gradually decline, and often when they are quite young. So when trying to predict the future value of a running back to a team (be it in Fantasy football or real life), people often use this concept to imply “Player A and Player B are both 23 years old with no major injury history, but Player A has carried the ball 1000 times while Player B has only carried it 500 times. Thus, I predict that Player B will be less likely to get injured and/or have a drop off in their athletic ability in the near future”.

But my argument is that “mileage” is actually irrelevant, or even positively predictive here. To me the relevant variables in predicting the future value of a running back (all else being equal) are 1) age, 2) actual injury history, and 3) some sort of immeasurable “durability” factor, which would be like how injury prone you are and how well your body ages. “Mileage” then would just a proxy for 1 and 2. So in the example of Player A and Player B above where these variables are equal, I think the fact that Player A carried the ball 1000 times without getting injured would be a positive as evidence of their durability.

I’m wondering if any fellow football nerds have thoughts on this or have seen any data about it? Or if any of the medical people think there is something to the concept of a sort of finite amount of high energy bursts of acceleration and collisions that your body can withstand before it deteriorates (ignoring head injuries)?

Old data at this point, but the Curse of 370 used to hold up pretty well for running backs.

No statistical evidence that baseball hitters who debut as pros younger have earlier peaks than players who remained as amateurs

In general I think mileage is more folk-logic than anything else. But I would say across many sports you see the phenomenon of a player playing an extreme outlier high stress and high use seasons can lead to a player breaking down.

Peak performance requires all of your joints to be in excellent shape. I think the issue is that every hard hit does a little bit of permanent damage. Or at least slow healing damage that never heals because they keep playing.

Accumulated micro-damage isn't visible. So the number of times they carried the ball is a reasonable proxy.

Having some dedicated fans go through all of the hits for each player and ranking them from 1-5 based on how hard they looked would probably also work well, but that's a lot more work.

For most purposes, it probably suffices for a fantasy enthusiast to say, "Derrick Henry takes a lot of abuse, I will devalue him going forward relative to his past performance". Getting more data-oriented is fun, of course, but sample size issues will apply when there just aren't that many players with massive carry burdens.

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