Who is Luke Richesson, and why does it matter to the NY Giants? I mean, this is a NY Giants blog, so why are we interested in the Strength & Conditioning Coach of the Denver Broncos? The answer is that he is just an ordinary guy doing his job to keep his team healthy, fit and strong enough to be competitive in the NFL. He’s not perfect. He has had some good years and some bad years with his teams. He was with Jacksonville in the same capacity in 2009-2011, and with the Broncos from 2012+. Here is his stat line along with that of the Giants and the 32 team averages for Adjust Games Lost to Injury (“AGL”) in those 6 years:
[table id=14 /]
One of the first things that should jump out at us is that Richesson is not perfect. The NFL is not perfect. Guys get hurt. You can’t control everything. A couple of extra players get hurt. Somebody tears his ACL. What may have been a great year for low injuries is now good, or what was average is below average. Richeson has had 2 years below average (with greater than average AGL’s), and 4 very solid years where his team’s health was excellent and AGLs were below average. Averaging out the pothole years, he comes out 7 AGL’s better than average, meaning that over the 6 years he’s been in the league, his teams starters have started 42 more games in total. It is not a lot. But it is enough to help keep his team on the field.
I’ll tell you what “a lot” is. A lot is the NY Giants. The NFL averages 62 lost starts due to injury (AGL’s) per season. The Giants have averaged 92 lost starts over this period. When comparing vs each year, 2009 4% worse than average, then 14% worse, 31% worse, 28% worse, 108% worse and 84% worse… The NY Giants have suffered 45% more lost starts than the rest of the league. That is really hard to do. This is why we believe that it is an outlier. It passes the eye test. You look at the data on the bell curve in the previous post, and there are the Colts and Giants, gapped apart from where the rest of the NFL resides. (Skip if you are not a nerd… Technically, one way to determine if a data point is an outlier is to ask if the data point is 1.5 times the spread between the 25th percentile and 75th percentile away from that range. In this case, from 52 AGL’s per year to 68 AGL’s per year is the distance from 25th to 75th percentile, or 16. 16 * 1.5 = 24. So we add 24 to the upper quartile of 68, that is 92, and the Giants (92) and Colts (94) are both Outliers in the 6 years of data.)
The common critique I hear from naysayers who want to dismiss or belittle the data’s conclusions is that it is luck. Victor Cruz tears his patellar tendon… how can you assign blame to the Strength & Conditioning coach for that? The answer is that we do not. We are not Doctors. And even for the injuries that are more preventable than others, you still do not know exactly what the situation was for each particular event. So this is why we rely on a much larger sample of data. We do not cherry pick 1 year. So why did we start in 2009? 2009 was the first year we spoke out about the injuries. We noticed a rash of hamstring injuries and knew intuitively that COLLECTIVELY, it was crazy for a team to have 7 players all with hamstring injuries at the same time. The Giants were not significantly below average (i.e. significantly higher AGL) that year in the NFL, but they were below average. Since hamstring injuries are nagging, players played through some, healed enough through training camp etc.. to limit the number of adjusted games lost. But that was the first time we saw evidence of a potential problem, and the data shows the trend only progressively got worse over the following 5 years.
Victor Cruz tore his patellar tendon. You know what? Every team has crazy sh*t that happens. That is why we look at averages. That is why we look at larger sets of data, not just one year. Even so, Cruz lost 10 games to that injury. If we ignored that injury, the Giants would still have 91 AGL’s per season instead of 92 AGL’s per season. IT DOES NOT MOVE THE NEEDLE WHEN YOU LOOK AT LARGER DATA SETS. And that is the point. We have been objective about not pointing the finger at any single year. Heaven knows that if we looked at the last 2 seasons when the Giants finished dead last, we would not be on Pluto, we’d be in the next solar system. That is not fair either. What is fair is a 6 year progression of a bad trend which collectively spells underperformance.
Is the entire problem that of the Strength & Conditioning Coach? No. He does not have control of what the General Manager does. As an example, if the NY Giants consistently draft players with poor injury track records in college, that would set up the S&C Coach for underperformance. Oza Odighizuwa is a possible example of this. He was taken in the 3rd round, and our Draft analyst had him as 2nd round value. Perhaps one of the reasons he fell in the draft was that he had hip problems in college. But he checked out with the Medical evaluation of the NY Giants Doctors. So the Medical staff gave their blessing. (Is the S&C Coach involved in this evaluation? We do not know.) The fact is that Reese consulted with his staff and the team picked him. Now his data is not in the 6 year analysis. But we respect that the S&C coach cannot control everything. While we leave some grace in this variable, we respectfully will contend that even if the Giants do draft players with weaker injury histories (which we really do not know, one way OR the other), the data set is SO large that it would make any 1 or 2 instances average out anyway. And all teams take chances on injury-prone players. Todd Gurley was picked super high in Round 1 (10th overall) despite an ACL tear in his senior year. AND, if a player gets hurt, he generally stops accumulating more AGL’s for a team because he is shed from the team. Unless a team is consistently drafting (and signing FA) players who are (significantly, 45%?) more prone to injury, you still have to assign plenty of responsibility and accountability to the S&C program when looking at a data set as large as this.
If we look at the high profile Free Agents signed by the Giants since 2009 as a subset, this can be ruled out as a factor contributing to underperformance BEFORE coming to the team. These 19 players averaged 13.6 games per season before the Giants signed them, or a rating of 53 AGLs per year. Because it was slightly below the NFL average, we can conclude that it did not predispose the team and its S&C efforts to failure. While playing for the Giants they averaged 12.7 games per season , which is on a per season basis roughly 73 AGL’s. We see a pre and post effect where the veteran signings on aggregate lost starts. Notable in this contribution on an individual basis were Canty, Boley, Baas and Schwartz. We had highlighted Canty and Baas in previous posts from anecdotal knowledge of their incoming high starts from previous teams and this analysis supports that.
As players get older, they get injured more, so how much this single factor is damaging to the S&C’s efforts would require greater analysis. Intuitively, we all understand that a team that drafts and cultivates its own talent without outside veteran Free Agents is likely to do better. Anecdotally, BAL and PIT use Free Agency less, and their AGL’s are 43 and 62 in the 6 year period. So generally speaking, if a team has to use more (older) veteran FA’s, that will likely contribute to higher AGL. The Giants added ~2.6 veteran (higher profile) signings per year in the period from 2009-2013. In 2014, they added 6. That jump was partially responsible for the 2014 poor AGL performance in sheer numbers. So this would be a contributing factor from the GM that should not be assigned to the S&C Coach. Even so, we estimate that the 2014 effect was a combined effort of both the GM and the S&C, since these players had an incoming 92 AGL (adjusted for a 22 man roster) and they finished their first year with a 187 AGL. That is tag team wrestling. Ouch. What it says is that too many veteran FA signings are going to explode the AGLs, and that is precisely what happened. But keep in mind that over the 6 year period, these Giant veteran signings were still (as a total group) below the NFL average for when they were signed, so we cannot on the whole assign responsibility to the GM. In 2014 yes there is a contribution to the poor performance, but for 2009-2014, no, there is not a total contribution from that source.
There are also some individual team issues, like where you play your games, and field conditions. Met Life had a UBU Sports Speed S5-M System installed for the past 2 seasons, which duplicates the field used in Cincinnati (’12-present), New Orleans (’10-present) and previously at the Metrodome (’11-’13). As a control, we can directly compare AGLs to the NY Jets, who have shared the same field (3 surfaces) for the past 6 years. During those 6 years, the Jets have averaged 46 AGL’s per season while the Giants have averaged 92 AGL’s per season. CIN, NO, and MIN. for their part, also averaged 49 AGL’s per year during their years with the same turf. So the playing field is not a factor.
One of the reasons we got bullish on the Giants (lol, right before Beatty got hurt, kiss of death?!) was because we felt that as horrible as 2013 and 2014 were for injuries, it would HAVE to get better. So far, Beatty’s injury will add roughly 10 AGL’s to the 2015 season, assuming he starts after the bye. It’s a tough loss. If we only knew the bleeding would just stop there.
When we talk about injuries being a structural issue, note what Football Outsiders had to say about the Colts, who are the other outlier with similar overall underperformance:
“The Colts ranked 30th in AGL for the third year in a row and have ranked 24th or worse in nine straight seasons. Jon Torine was the strength and conditioning coach from 1998 to 2011, but he was replaced in 2012 by Roger Marandino. Despite three head coaches since 2002, Ryan Grigson’s annual roster purge, and new philosophies on both sides of the ball, the Colts continue to be one of the NFL’s most injured teams each season. Yes, I just copied most of last year’s paragraph, because nothing changed in Indianapolis on the injury front.”
The point here is that for many teams, luck pushes them around from year to year. Over longer periods of time, some teams are making a difference and others are not. You can’t control one year. But you can try to make a difference over an extended period of time if you are doing things properly. Football Outsiders inferred that Chip Kelly is making strides, and they linked to this article back in October 2013. Well, we only have two years of data. But so far, the Eagles, who averaged 59 AGL’s in the previous 4 years from 2009-2012 before he arrived, now have an average of 40 AGL’s per season from 2013-2014 in the 2 years that Kelly has taken over as head coach. Over that short stretch, that is #1 in the NFL, the lowest of any team. We can’t and won’t draw too many conclusions from only 2 years of data from Chip Kelly. What we will say is that if you are not doing everything you can to compete, you are going to be left behind.
Summary: The Giants are suffering 45% more lost starts due to injuries over a 6 year period than the average NFL team. This is serial underperformance. The rapid increase in 2014 GM veteran high profile signings contributed to higher AGLs the past year, but for the entire period from 2009-2014 this was not a contributing factor. We are fairly certain that over such a large period of time, there have to be ways that this franchise can obtain significant improvement. We do not imply that people like Luke Richesson and Chip Kelly have a monopoly on success or the secret to no injuries. They merely tell us that a little bit of change can go a long way.
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