ACL Injuries

Throughout this quarter of Stats class, we have learned many things.  The thing that I did and enjoyed was researching ACL injuries.  This year I have seen many professional athletes go down with torn ACL's. This started to make me wonder and I became interested in how likely it is for an ACL injury to occur.  To find how likely an ACL injury is to occur you can use this graph from BMJ Publsihing group.

To calculate the occurrence of ACL injuries with your team and in real life situations, you need to plug numbers given into an equation of players multiplied by exposures multiplied again by the injury rate above then divided by 1000. The number of ACL injuries that you would expect to see from a hockey team of 40 players who are on the ice 85 times during the season would be about once every 5 seasons or .204. Surprisingly, the Byron Bears did not suffer any ACL injuries to their football team this season. They had a roster of 45 players and the probability of an ACL injury occurring is .445 ACL injuries per season.

Throughout this process I learned some very interesting things, whether it be about the ACL or how often of an occurrence ACL injuries are. I also talked to my friends dad who is a general surgeon and he was talking to me about the ACL and other ligaments of the knee. That was very good for me as I was able to understand what I was researching more in depth. This project also took some time to complete. I was also more interested because of the injury that Adrian Peterson suffered a couple years ago. I wanted to know the chances that a football team will have players with an ACL injury. For a pro football team that does not make the playoffs, the number of ACL tears per season would be 1.602, obviously some teams might have more than others just depending on other factors that go into it. Being able to put these numbers and predictions into real life situations is what I enjoyed most about this project. I am excited to see at the end of the season how many injuries teams have as by those calculations, there should be around 51 ACL tears. Through 7 weeks there were 38 ACL tears, which would surpass the expected number of 51. This could be due to multiple things including the high speed in the pros and the physicality of the game. I had a lot of fun working on this project and learned many cool things!