Originally posted by Giedi:
Well our super bowl years had a dominating defense and an efficient offense. The ball control offense keeps the defense off the field healthy and rested, and those super bowl teams were *deep!* So fatigue during the super bowl runs were minimal when compared to the non-super bowl seasons. If fatigue is a major cause (but not the only cause) of injuries, the picks this draft and free agency of getting depth will deal with that issue in a big way. I hope our injury stats regress to the mean, it shouldn't be statistically possible to keep that at an above the average level 4+ years in a row, if injuries are truly random, or correlated to fatigue.
Absolutely. It's a great theory. We saw fatigue play a factor with Fangio...burning out veterans with high snap counts and then eventually, a mass retirement in the 2014 offseason.
You're so right...after 4 years, with all this youth (and depth), probability says we should move back to the mean, at least. No way we could be top 10 in injuries for a 5th year in a row, right?
Note, to your point, the last time we were tops in health...2011 (7th) and 2012 (1st).
Then the breakdown started: 2013 (23rd). 2014 (23rd). 2014 off season = retirements.
The cool thing about that trend was that Harbaugh's philosophy was exactly the same all 4 of those years yet the first two years we were remarkably healthy and then just the opposite his last two years.
[ Edited by NCommand on Jul 9, 2018 at 3:42 PM ]