With Week 14 upon us four regular season weeks remain on the NFL schedule and the concussions don’t seem to be any lower than last year at this time. The numbers at this point are almost identical to last year for the regular season however the overall number since the season began is up 23%. As Will Carroll wrote in his Med Check on SI.com this may primarily be due to awareness and reporting (with the lack of transparency from some teams it’s a w0nder it is higher). Currently we have 122 regular season concussions listed as opposed to 119 last year through 13 weeks.
And the NFL is tweeting about how a player is “tough” for playing though memory loss and possible brain injury, WTF:
@NFL: Roethlisberger wasn’t the only tough QB last night… though Colt McCoy doesn’t recall the hit he gutted out. http://bit.ly/tAvS6I
With all of our experience we still miss some information on concussions and how they are occurring. We really wanted to track all the special teams concussions especially the kick off; because of the rule change. Scouring our sources and the journalists articles we have been short of saying we are successful at pinpointing the numbers. We have found that 8 of the 122 were on ST and 2 on kick off; with many of the players listed being reserves it seems plausible that those too happened on special teams.
A new source was found this week leading us to update the numbers (hence the sharp increase from last week in overall concussions); @NFLConcussions was helpful in finding some missed injuries. Their numbers are a bit lower than ours but it will be a good resource for us going forward.
What I find as peculiar is that even with the first reported regular season concussion from the Redskins there still remains four teams that have yet to list one in the regular season and TWO to report ZERO concussions from the opening of camp: Cincinnati and Miami. Meanwhile the leaders in reporting, Carolina, Oakland and St. Louis, continues to be transparent with their injuries. The actual question now and at the end of the season will be what extreme is more toward the norm? I would hypothesize that the Panthers, Raiders and Rams are much closer to the actual mean than the Bengals and Dolphins. Obviously there still needs to me more transparency to get a firm grasp on the incidence rates.
Now on to the running totals (168 total from camp on), mind you we found 6 additional regular season concussions from previous weeks:
- 122 Concussions/head injuries (110 W12)
- 9.38 Concussions/week (9.17 W12)
- 160 Projected Concussions (156 W12)
- 0.62 Concussions/game (0.61 W12)
- 11.08% InR (10.82 W12)
- 9.41% EInR (9.19 W12)
- 62 Offensive – 60 Defense
- Positionally Speaking
- QB – 3, RB – 11, TE – 14, WR – 15, OL – 19, DL – 12, LB – 16, DB – 32
- Team Breakdown
- OAK – 8
- PHI, SEA, STL – 7
- BAL, CAR, SD – 6
- CLE, DEN, DET, IND, MIN, NE, NYG, TEN – 5
- ATL, JAX, PIT – 4
- GB, KC, NO, NYJ, SF – 3
- ARI, CHI, TB – 2
- DAL, WAS – 1
- BUF, CIN, HOU
, MIA – 0
Our definition of Incidence Rate (InR) is projected concussions/45 players taking the field per team per game, our definition of Epidemiological Incidence Rate (EInR) is projected concussions/53 man roster per team.
The Concussion Blog 