Durability Factor
by Greg Alan

4for4 Rankings with Reasons^® ...

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With permission, portions of this page are from Greg Alan’s "NFL Injuries: A Defining Look" featured in Fantasy Football Pro Forecast magazine.
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Durability Factor: In order to generate the best draft day roster possible, it’s important you shatter the mold of traditional thinking about injuries. 

4for4.com cheat sheets incorporate several of my high-yield techniques that will greatly enhance your odds of drafting a tremendous roster! Leveraging this information and putting it into practice will enable you to avoid unnecessary injury risks and in the long run, help you win more and improve your Fantasy Football record.

Regardless of how serious you are about winning a Fantasy Football Championship, despite how successful you’ve been in the past and independent of your meticulous draft day preparation, showing no respect for your knowledge, Injuries can send you for a loss! Or worse, if not properly prepared, Injuries can cost you an entire season.

So what can be done? Aren’t injuries just part of the game? Mostly all luck? The dreaded random factor? 

Certainly no one is safe and in the short-run, luck plays a role. However, on draft day, by applying historically proven principles and leveraging fact-based research, you can minimize the impact. To be successful in the long run, you need to minimize the luck factor, apply information, and go with the historical odds, not against them.

Can you really predict injury risk based on the past? The answer is yes, but not with 100% accuracy. However, by employing several of my techniques, you can increase your odds of avoiding injury problems. 

Predicting injury (and reduced Fantasy Football output) with 100% accuracy would be incredible; but it’s impossible. In addition, 99% accuracy isn’t realistic either. However, to gain a true competitive advantage over your fellow Fantasy Football owner, you don’t need spot-on accuracy. 

My injury management techniques are designed for the long run. Certainly, short term, things won’t always work out. Keep in mind, short term, a rather inept Fantasy Football owner could easily prevail over the best owners in the world. Why? The answer is rather simple! The in the short run, football results can and often do vary from the true odds.

However, by putting these techniques into action, never deviating and using them over and over and over again, you’ll make it to the long run. When you do, because you put the odds in your favor, you’ll be standing inside the winner’s circle!  

Findings below are based on over 1,400 regular season NFL games and incorporate injury status information as well as traditional football statistics.

Given that, what follows is not only my advice on how to manage injuries. Rather, it’s the way to manage based on looking at thousands of NFL players - exhaustive review of years of NFL action. As such, in the near future, all responsible Fantasy Football authors will likely provide similar advice.

On draft day, everything else being equal, you want to avoid members of the “Bumps and Bruises” club. In the context of preparing for the draft, I’ll use a ‘Questionable’ or ‘Doubtful’ listing on the official NFL weekly injury report as a way to define “Bumps and Bruises.” For the prepared Fantasy owner, having a player ruled ‘Out’ in advance, can often be more desirable than dealing with the uncertainty of a ‘Questionable’ or ‘Doubtful’ situation.

With this in mind, computer analysis was required to develop a historically valid predictor of the Number of Games an NFL player will appear as ‘Questionable’ or ‘Doubtful’ in the upcoming season. In addition, I commissioned the analysis so it would be concise, exact and yet offer a very powerful strategy.

After structuring the challenge, it became clear. Predicting the number of times an NFL player will appear ‘Questionable’ or ‘Doubtful’ in the upcoming season involves many factors. In some cases, factors become circular. For example, everything else being equal, better players tend to get more playing time. The more time an NFL player spends in a game, the more likely he is to get hurt. The more likely he is to get hurt, the more likely he is to show up as ‘Questionable’ or ‘Doubtful’ or miss a game. The more games one sits out, the less time they spend on the field. The less time they spend on the field, the less likely they are to get injured and/or re-injured. As such, they have less of a chance to show up as ‘Questionable’ or ‘Doubtful’.

Here’s the deal. After going over numerous structuring exercises like the one above and employing advanced segmentation software, I was able to develop a number of simple yet generally encompassing decision rules to capture most complex situations. Below, we will review three of these rules.

What really counts is how good these techniques are at helping you avoid players that will end up with “Bumps and Bruises” in 2001. That’s the bottom line. Based on how drastically these guidelines improve odds, I think its safe to say, we’ve done it. These findings apply to QBs, RBs, WRs and TEs.

1) Long Live the Iron-man! (A-Grade)

Players that started 14 or more regular season games in the prior year and never appeared as ‘Questionable’ or ‘Doubtful’ will show up ‘Questionable’ or ‘Doubtful’ 61% less often than all other players starting 14 or more games the prior season. Everything else being equal, you want to aggressively seek out and draft players that started 14 or more games last season and were never listed as ‘Questionable’ or ‘Doubtful.’ Heading into 2001, the list includes Tim Brown, Cris Carter, Kerry Collins, Tony Gonzalez, Eric Moulds, Rod Smith and Jeff Garcia.

2) You’ve been warned! (D-Grade)

If a player started between 9 and 13 games last year and appeared ‘Questionable’ or ‘Doubtful’ two or more times, you should expect trouble the following season. In fact, players with multiple ‘Questionable’ or ‘Doubtful’ listings, in a season in which they only started between 9 and 13 games, are 232% more likely to appear as ‘Questionable’ or ‘Doubtful’ in the upcoming season than the average NFL player. Coach Dick Vermeil is fond of saying the NFL implies Not For Long. If a player falls into the 9-13 (2+) category that often spells problems and despite how good their prior accomplishments, the torch may be getting passed. Devalue accordingly and draft with caution. For 2001, several very familiar names fall out here. They include Brian Griese, Derrick Mason, Terrell Owens, Michael Pittman, Albert Connell, Herman Moore and Tyrone Wheatley.

3) Keep your guard up! (E-Grade)

Players falling into this segment often draw less fantasy interest at the beginning of the season. But not always, so be sure you don’t get caught off guard. Here you’re looking for players that started in 8 or fewer games last season and appeared ‘Questionable’ or ‘Doubtful’ multiple times. These players tend to be really banged up and/or small in stature. In any case, on average they will appear ‘Questionable’ or ‘Doubtful’ 196% more often in the upcoming season than similar players that managed to avoid multiple injury report listing the prior year. Heading into 2001, several players in this category include Chad Morton, Yancey Thigpen, J.R. Remond, Dorsey Levens, Raghib Ismail, Wesley Walls and Tim Dwight. 

As a side note, on draft day, if faced with a virtual toss-up between drafting an individual player or a team defense, I’d suggest you minimize the injury risk and select a defense. Certainly the entire defense won’t end up on the IR list. In addition, this can be especially effective late in the draft. Historically, defenses are harder to predict. The chance of obtaining a top tier defense late in the draft is much better than predicting which journeyman wide receiver might suddenly have a solid year.

As you are drafting players this year, don’t fall into the trap of thinking a particular player will beat the odds. If you do, you’re fighting the odds and in the long run, you simply won’t prevail. In Fantasy Football, the more you go with the odds, the more likely you’ll walk away a winner.

Finally, as you’re drafting, time permitting, I suggest you keep a side count, by position, of player durability ratings.

This can be very practical in the middle rounds of your draft. Simply stated, if your #1 player at a position has a D health rating, be sure the next player you draft at that slot is also not a major injury risk! Example: All things being equal don’t draft Brian Griese as your number #1 QB this year and then select Chris Chandler as your #2 QB.

On draft day you want to craftily avoided injury time bombs and still obtain outstanding value picks along the way. The 4for4.com rankings successfully incorporate several of my proven injury management techniques.