07-08-2015, 06:23 PM
(07-08-2015, 06:06 PM)Wes Mantooth Wrote: They weren't decimated by injuries in 2009, 2011, 2012, or 2013. What happened?
Also, I would encourage people to look at some injury situations around the league and then compare them to ours and ask again what constitutes "being decimated". Because losing a starting QB, that's going to hurt a lot worse than losing a backup tight end, coming off 300 yards receiving.
We were really "decimated"? Have we had more injuries than any other average team over the last few years? Losing your starting QB like Sam Bradford or Carson Palmer, that really hurts a team. Losing Julio Jones for the season in week 5, like the Falcons did in 2013, is worse than losing AJ Green for 3-4 games. The loss of Calvin Johnson last season was a bigger blow.
Each and every year you can see the injury report littered with names much bigger than Eifert and Jones. Names like Arian Foster, Jamaal Charles, Roddy White, Reggie Bush, etc.
Each and every year you see position much more valuable than Middle Linebacker go down. Hell, look at the Cardinals last year. They went through two QB's. Is Vontaze Burfict a fantastic player? Sure. Is he a better MLB than Palmer is a QB? Definitely. But is MLB of greater or equal in value to a starting QB? Not even close. If you were to rank which team was hurt worse, team QB or team MLB, team QB is taking a much bigger hit.
So again how many injuries have we seen recently? Going back 1 year, 2 years, 3 years, 4 years, what's the volume like? Are we seeing a higher than normal amount of total injuries? And what about the value of the players lost? If you were to try to assign a value to every players lost, would we have lost a greater caliber of player than our peers? Are we having a higher rate of starting players hurt? Are we having a higher rate of star players hurt? What about the rate of IR's?
I think the answer you would find to most of these questions would support the fact that we haven't seen a greater deal of injuries these last 4 years than average. No more than normal. In fact, you may find that we've been somewhat lucky. I also think you'd see that we haven't loss any greater caliber of player than the norm either. Our starters, stars, key contributors, leaders, whatever you want to call them, aren't dropping at any higher of a rate than that of most everybody else.
I personally think the injury excuse is one of the most overstated excuses you see when it comes to rationalizing another early exit. New England won a Superbowl with their #1 WR playing both ways and starting at CB. The Giants won a Superbowl with Jeff Hostetler. The Texans beat our very Bengals in the playoffs with a 3rd string rookie QB. Acting like this team saw such bad luck recently isn't accurate IMO.
I would love to believe we won't have a single injury or that staying relatively healthy, just like we did a number of other years, will result in fixing all our woes. And if it doesn't play out that way then I'm sure I can expect to hear about some new and exciting excuse nest year. The sun being in Marvin's eyes perhaps? Black magic? Iluminati conspiracy?
If injuries didn't matter, you wouldn't have exorbitant salaries, because you could theoretically plug in any schmo and you wouldn't have any drop off whatsoever. I mean, the Giants won a SB with Hostettler for crissakes!
In regard to the Dalton Green era, in 2011 they were rookies coming off a 4 win season. 2013 they should have won. 2014 they shouldn't even had made the playoffs given all the injuries.
My optimism comes from finally having a home-run hitter in the backfield. Couple him with two playmaking WRs and watch out. I also like that we have our D-line rotation back. It was a pretty good one before Johnson left.
