For Chiefs, other teams, concerns about NFL’s return go beyond coronavirus protocols
As many have spent weeks avoiding one another — or at least keeping one another at safe distance — a sport that demands direct and constant contact has considered how to march on.
The NFL is discussing testing and mitigation plans, along with practice protocols and social distancing policies as it welcomes coaches back to facilities as early as Monday, June 1. These are the most prominent talking points for the country’s most profitable sport in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic.
But as a backdrop to the obvious challenges, the sports science community is concerned with one more hurdle that cannot be ignored.
Injuries.
A rash of them.
They’ve seen it before in the NFL, back in 2011. There’s evidence of it overseas today in another sport.
If and when football is provided the true green light, the medical experts say, not all will simply return to normal.
Rather, not all can afford to return to normal.
“Without question, the thing that immediately comes to mind is you’ve got to be very careful to manage work loads, or you’re going to have a heightened risk for injury,” said Kirk McCullough, a Sporting Kansas City team physician and long-standing NFL musculoskeletal subcommittee member. “I would not say this is an inevitable freight train coming that can’t be stopped, but the concern is legitimate. I think the saying goes: ‘Those who don’t learn from history are doomed to repeat it.’”
The history: 2011.
The potential lockout year.
The NFL missed its entire offseason — 18 weeks — as owners and players negotiated a new collective bargaining agreement. Just two days after a deal was announced, training camp began.
And so did the injuries. In the first 12 days after players returned for camp, 10 of them suffered Achilles tendon ruptures. In the first 29 days, there were 12 of them — more instances of that exact injury than typically occurs over an entire season, according to a study in the Journal of Orthopaedic and Sports Physical Therapy.
In late July of that year, the Chiefs signed linebacker Brandon Siler and projected him to start. He never played a down in 2011, an Achilles tendon rupture ending his season before it began.
Training camp remains six weeks away, but players have already missed three phases of offseason workouts, including the organized team activities that would normally be progressing now. There is still the potential they can return in some fashion before the third phase has been completed, commissioner Roger Goodell told teams in a memo Thursday.
Those phases provide players a baseline of fitness and activity, something of a ramp-up period before camp arrives. Instead, players are not yet permitted inside team facilities unless receiving medical treatment or rehabbing for an existing injury. Workouts are completed on their own, or sometimes done via video online programs with their team’s strength and conditioning staffs.
It’s making the best of a difficult situation.
It’s not an exact replication.
“There’s a big difference between the general fitness you and I would do, the general fitness for an NFL athlete and the next-level performance training that all of these guys would be getting with strength and conditioning staffs,” said Aaron Borgmann, who worked in the NFL for 12 seasons, including five with the Chiefs as a physical therapist and assistant athletic trainer. “These guys have to be at a baseline of not only cardio shape but also strength training, not to mention plyometrics, loading their tendons and their joints and things of that sort.
“When you take that away, which is all regimented expertly by the strength and conditioning staffs and some of the smartest people in the world in sports science, no matter how well an athlete might do on his own, it’s just not the same.”
Running his own shop now at Borgmann Rehab Solutions, Borgmann still works with current NFL athletes. He still has friends employed in the league. He says he’s heard positive reports on athletes’ participation in the recommended offseason workouts in a variety of ways from different teams. Locally, Chiefs coaches have applauded their attendance numbers.
Unlike the lockout-threatened season, players have an ability maintain contact with team strength and conditioning personnel, as well as medical staffs. It’s why Borgmann says they’re better prepared for camp than they were in 2011, despite the absence of on-field work. They also have a lesson from the past.
But they must learn from it and adjust.
It’s already on the mind of Chiefs coach Andy Reid. Asked what is most difficult to replicate on the video training, Reid pointed immediately to preparing a player’s body for play.
“If you talk to medical people, you understand injuries can go up if you’re not working change of direction or being tugged on like a running back would be tackled, and he’s gotta pull through a tackle,” Reid said. “It has a tendency to (increase) injuries. We saw that a little bit with the lockout year with Achilles tendons. So those things end up being important.”
The awareness is a critical first step. The next might require an alteration to the way training camp is conducted — or at least the pace in which it’s conducted. Will it need to start earlier? Will it need to cut into the preseason games schedule?
Borgmann and McCullough each expressed confidence the NFL and the NFL Players Association will have a plan in place to limit risk. Others have expressed similar optimism.
The key is extending an acclimatization period beyond the current framework of training camp — therefore replacing the lost time. When players have had the opportunity to participate in the initial three phases of offseason programs, for example, teams devote only a couple of days to an acclimatization period. With the phases already canceled, however, the baseline cannot be assumed.
In short, they’ll need more time.
“When you don’t have that ramp-up time, and you have practices start from a standstill, that’s when you see the potential for more injury. You can’t go from 0 to 60 in sports, and if you do, you’re setting yourself up for failure,” Borgmann said. “Consider the engine of your car — you don’t just step on the accelerator as hard as you can. If you do, you’re going to cause some problems. That’s a very rough analogy, but it’s not all that dissimilar.”
There’s an ongoing Exhibit A overseas.
Bundesliga, the German soccer league, resumed play earlier this month. The first week of matches produced 0.88 injuries per game, a 226% increase on pre-lockdown numbers of 0.27 injuries per game this season, according to data compiled by Joel Mason, a sports scientist at the Jena Institute of Sports Science in Germany. In the second week of games, the numbers remained high at 0.78 injures per contest. One team had five players sidelined.
“The results offer a clear warning to other teams plotting their own returns that will likely get louder in the coming weeks — preserving physical performance comes at a cost if the re-training process isn’t carefully managed,” Mason wrote.
The process of acclimatization requires compliance from the individual athletes, too. And there are a few that prompt concern — players new to teams.
The urge to make a quick impression can prompt an athlete to push his body when it’s not yet trained for the work by the professionals tasked with doing the training. Rookies always try to make strong first impressions. Others might be fighting for roster spots — the normal preseason battles.
“The concern here is not so much with the veterans; it becomes more the guys who are new to an organization, such as the rookies, the undrafted free agents and the off-season acquisitions who are coming into the organization for the first time and are going to feel like they have to prove themselves and produce immediately,” McCullough said. “They’re going to come in, and in order to get up to speed and show their teammates and coaches what they’ve got, they clearly have more to prove than someone seasoned with the organization. From a sheer survival and viability standpoint, they want every opportunity to show themselves, and they might be going at a different speed than a guy who knows his roster spot or place in the depth chart is secured.”
The risk of injury will never be eliminated, of course. McCullough, who has performed three operations on Achilles ruptures in the past week and a half, said such injuries are often unforeseen.
But doctors do know this: Too much too soon can be problematic.
This story was originally published May 29, 2020 at 5:00 AM.