Quote:
Originally Posted by Rain Man
A couple of comments about those injury stats.
First, statistics on "returned to play" are not definitive. Different internet sites show different numbers, but in general roster retention from year to year is about 70 percent or less. I'm being conservative here since most sites show it lower. So if 70 percent of players come back that means that ANY group of 17 players will have 5 who don't return to play the following year. So that means your baseline is that 12 of the 17 return to play. If the post-injury guys come back at a 6 of 17 rate, that's a 50 percent return from injury. Not ideal, of course, but a lot better than 20 or 30 percent.
Second, the 20 to 30 percent figures are from the instant of injury. So when a guy is down on the ground, you can point at him and say, "He's got a 20 percent chance of coming back." From that point on, your knowledge gets better. Two years later, you can point at the same guy and confidently say with 100 percent certainty that he came back or he didn't. So during that two year period, your likelihood of guessing correctly gets constantly better, because you're moving down a timeline from being unsure to being sure. Since Mr. Simmons is X months down the timeline from injury, the odds of guessing his likelihood of returning are a lot better than 20 percent.
Put another way, let's say that we're firing ten simultaneous arrows at a target 100 yards away, and we have a 20 percent chance of hitting the bullseye when we fire each one. Two of them will hit and eight of them will miss.
Now imagine that we can freeze time when those arrows are 25 yards from our bow. We can look at the ten arrows and pretty confidently pick some that are clearly off target, and weed them out. Now we let them move another 25 yards and we do it again. We weed out more arrows that are off target and keep watching the ones that look close. We do it again 25 yards later and we can pretty confidently pick the two arrows that are going to hit the bullseye.
We're not evaluating Mr. Simmons at the moment that his arrow was fired. We're evaluating him well down range, which means we're better able to predict if he's on target or off.
This is going to be a big win for us. The Chiefs organization is competent and well run. I don't care if teams like the Chargers or Bears make a different decision, because they're usually going to be wrong.
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Rainman, you've CLOSE to the real issue here, but you're only hitting the edges of the target.
Part of the problem is, most people don't know much about study design. I know you do marketing analysis, so you get MOST of it, but do you have much of a background in hard science?
The key problem is this is nothing more than what doctors call a pilot study. Meaning, a small sample of cases to see if further research is warranted.
Not only is the sample size way too small for percentages to mean much, MEDICAL TECHNOLOGY CHANGES RAPIDLY.
So, they had to go back to 2009 to get even a handful of cases, and surgical techniques could have vastly improved over 16 years. Thus, the prognosis for a patient in 2009 could be vastly different than in 2022 (at the end of sample).
For example, if you asked about the prognosis of a pitcher with a rotator cuff injury in 1974, well....a sample of orthopedic literature would have said, "give up, he's toast." As we all know, Tommy Jobn went on to win more game AFTER Dr. Jobe repaired his rotator cuff than he won before his shoulder surgery on his way to the HOF.
16 years later, it was a vastly different world.
Now, I don't know if that's the case for patellar knee injuries. But crow doesn't either. However, the Chiefs' team doctor presumably knows the state of the art and Veach has better sources of information than any of us.