The Curse of 370 and Running Back Injury Rates

I think both sides have something to add to the discussion.  I cringe at the use of the word “curse”, whether it is a Madden curse or a Super Bowl Loser’s curse or a Curse of 370.  The public will too often latch on to the curse and apply it blindly, without considering it fully. Would it be better for a team to rest a guy that has carried the ball 360 times going into the final week just to avoid crossing that line? Of course not. The rebuttals are correct in certain aspects. The choice of endpoints is selective to achieve maximum results, and the sample size and results do not have statistical significance when compared to the group of backs with 344-369 carries.

On the other hand, the highest workload backs did miss more games the next year. What standard do we want to apply to make decisions on whether workload is costly for a franchise making these decisions?  Are we going to demand that there is only a 5% chance that the resulting difference were obtained by random chance before we adapt behavior?  Would you let your franchise back carry the ball 400 times because the p-value is not 0.05 (if you knew what a p-value was)?

Unfortunately, those darn coaches and players won’t cooperate and give every starting back 25 carries every game until they get hurt or get to the end of the year, so we can have larger sample sizes.  For all the legal experts out there, I think we should probably look more at a “more likely than not” standard, as opposed to a “beyond a reasonable doubt” standard.  I don’t want to be unneccessarily resting my starter if he could play more without substantial injury increase, but I also don’t want to overplay him if it could cause injury.  Were I making a decision as a coach or GM, I would have to lean toward the outcome I thought more likely, and not blindly insist on statistical significance.

Tomorrow, I am going to hopefully add to the discourse again. I’ll have lots of stats – or as I would prefer to call them, recorded observations of fact.  I will try to present it in as interesting of a way as possible, but if you are averse to a large table showing hundreds of games and several thousand carries and hundreds of injuries and games missed, you have been warned.  [photos via Getty]