Mormon Red Death
03-28-2014, 06:57 AM
So no surprise but Saban is full of shit. According to the data (http://grantland.com/the-triangle/cfb-matrix-dave-bartoo-q-a-player-safety/)
This was last summer, when [Nick] Saban and later [Bret] Bielema started talking about pace of play and injuries. And obviously I don’t have any access to private files from schools, or anything like that, but we have all this public information. And there’s plenty of stat-geek people out there. There’s so much public information that you can find. There are so many places with catastrophic injury lists, season-ending injuries, starts lost to injury. And statistics-wise, there are spreadsheets out there that will tell you the exact minute of a game that every play was run, and what kind of play it was, so you can take all of this information and try to make something of it.
The first thing I did is just simply look at who’s playing fast, who’s playing slow, and what is the rate loss on injuries. I looked at 2012, and I looked at the big five conferences, and I was amazed to find that when you look at the number of plays run per game, the thing that stood out the most, right away, is the conference that played the slowest, slowest pace of play per game in 2012, was the SEC. The fastest was the Big 12. And when you look at the number of starts lost to injury in the SEC, it had the highest rate, and the Big 12 had the lowest.
Then I pulled up a couple more numbers. The heaviest conference, the biggest in 2012? The SEC. The lightest of the five? The Big 12. And it just simply went the opposite direction from where I expected, because when [coaches] started talking about this, my assumption was: They have a lot of information, they have some data, they wouldn’t say this without something backing it up. These are very smart football guys. I thought, “I need to either find something that correlates with what they’re saying, or just doesn’t agree.” I was really shocked to find the opposite. But what also makes sense, too, is the bigger you are, the more you’re going to get hurt.
So from there, it was 2011, 2010, 2009. It kept coming up the same thing. The injury rates, as a whole, over those four years: slowest conference in pace of play, SEC. Highest rate of injury starts lost per play, SEC. For 2013, I looked at catastrophic injuries, season-ending injuries. Again, where were these coming from? They were coming, percentage-wise, from the SEC. So, really, the conclusion is, the bigger the guys, the more you’re going to get hurt.
This was last summer, when [Nick] Saban and later [Bret] Bielema started talking about pace of play and injuries. And obviously I don’t have any access to private files from schools, or anything like that, but we have all this public information. And there’s plenty of stat-geek people out there. There’s so much public information that you can find. There are so many places with catastrophic injury lists, season-ending injuries, starts lost to injury. And statistics-wise, there are spreadsheets out there that will tell you the exact minute of a game that every play was run, and what kind of play it was, so you can take all of this information and try to make something of it.
The first thing I did is just simply look at who’s playing fast, who’s playing slow, and what is the rate loss on injuries. I looked at 2012, and I looked at the big five conferences, and I was amazed to find that when you look at the number of plays run per game, the thing that stood out the most, right away, is the conference that played the slowest, slowest pace of play per game in 2012, was the SEC. The fastest was the Big 12. And when you look at the number of starts lost to injury in the SEC, it had the highest rate, and the Big 12 had the lowest.
Then I pulled up a couple more numbers. The heaviest conference, the biggest in 2012? The SEC. The lightest of the five? The Big 12. And it just simply went the opposite direction from where I expected, because when [coaches] started talking about this, my assumption was: They have a lot of information, they have some data, they wouldn’t say this without something backing it up. These are very smart football guys. I thought, “I need to either find something that correlates with what they’re saying, or just doesn’t agree.” I was really shocked to find the opposite. But what also makes sense, too, is the bigger you are, the more you’re going to get hurt.
So from there, it was 2011, 2010, 2009. It kept coming up the same thing. The injury rates, as a whole, over those four years: slowest conference in pace of play, SEC. Highest rate of injury starts lost per play, SEC. For 2013, I looked at catastrophic injuries, season-ending injuries. Again, where were these coming from? They were coming, percentage-wise, from the SEC. So, really, the conclusion is, the bigger the guys, the more you’re going to get hurt.