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hamilton's avatar

I'm a Pats fan (and have been for over 30 years, so even before the Dynasty, when we sucked). I've thought about this a lot - I think one of the things that was a little overlooked about the so-called "Patriot Way" was that they realized early on that middle-class players (veterans with ending rookie contracts) were the best deal in football and allowed you to build up tremendous depth. This gets them a lot of criticism for the "ponies not horses" part of the debate, but effectively it meant that (short of losing Brady in 08) the team could weather losing a number of starters because it had reasonable patches in place. So thing 1 I think is that smart teams can think of how to leverage the roster (especially with the new practice squad rules) to try to plan for this type of issue, accepting that it means you are not shooting for an elite team (or, more accurately, not shooting for a team of elite players with the exception of the QB of course). And eliminating the Emergency QB also explicitly took away a major chunk of injury insurance that the 49ers could have used.

Another factor in this honestly is that in the last few CBAs the amount of hitting, hard conditioning, and preseason practice has gone down drastically, as has the number of in-season padded practices. While I agree that preseason games are mostly injury-fests and too risky (though bubble players might beg to differ), I 100% think that losing that conditioning time is correlated to the higher injury rate.

For the other 3 major sports they often talk about a marathon not a sprint, given the huge number of games. The NFL is a marathon of another sort, given the attrition, and teams ought to explicitly plan for that.

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Sugar_glider's avatar

I disagree that this is unique to football. If anything, due to the size of rosters and the sheer amount of players on the field, injuries impact the NFL the least (except, of course, at the QB position). I think you can argue that having enough depth on your roster to withstand the onslaught of injuries is proof that the Super Bowl champion is worthy.

Basketball, on the other hand, is a total crapshoot due to the small amount of players on the floor and the outsized impact a single player can have. Look at the Nets two years ago, when they were without Harden and Kyrie - they lost to the eventual champion Bucks by the slimmest of margins. Or last year, the Bucks took to the Celtics to the limit without Kris Middleton, but came up short because they needed his offense. The Celtics could have won the Championship if not for Robert Williams' knee giving out on him and crippling their interior defense. Kawhi's Raptors won after Klay tore his ACL and KD's achilles exploded. Every playoffs have many examples of this, but the difference in basketball is that there's no way to scheme around the absence of these players or have a "next man up" mantra like in football. If your second or third best player is out for a week or two, you're likely done. In the NFL, if your best offensive lineman goes down, you can still find ways to produce on offense. As a Patriots fan (I know), it felt gratifying to see the team win with Troy Brown at CB or third string special teams guys making key tackles because the team had planned for those moments when their 53 man roster would be pushed to its limits.

I'll reiterate the caveat that if your QB goes down, you're probably fucked and it's a fair criticism about the modern sport that one player can affect things so much.

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