Expectations For Dante Moore Post-Injury?
The big football story last week was the injury suffered by Oregon quarterback Dante Moore, a concussion sustained from a cheap-shot hit.
Our Alex Vigderman did a thorough investigation on quarterback performance post-concussion.
He wrote …
Concussions sit in a weird spot because so many of them don’t result in any immediate missed games, but they can obviously have lifelong ramifications. The nature of the hit and the resulting treatment on the field makes Moore’s situation more likely to lead to time missed, though.
Players who show only a mild reaction initially or even those for whom play is stopped to pull them off the field are most likely to miss no games after the injury. Having an ambulance, stretcher, etc. brought onto the field makes it much less likely the player returns the next week (although that rate is still a third of the time!), and much more likely for him to miss multiple games. Even if we look only at players with previous concussion history, it is more common for a player to miss no time than to miss a game or more.
Games missed due to concussions by initial severity, FBS
Initial Severity | 0 Games | 1 Game | 2+ Games |
No reaction | 80% | 7% | 13% |
Mild reaction | 67% | 17% | 17% |
Leaves field | 70% | 16% | 14% |
Leaves field, | 69% | 18% | 13% |
Extended stoppage, | 31% | 26% | 43% |
To compare roughly apples-to-apples, I took a sample of 39 quarterbacks who played at least 3 games prior to a concussion and at least 4 games afterward, and compared their rolling performance after the concussion to their pre-concussion average.
The picture ended up muddy for most of these metrics.
One consistent area I found an effect was how quickly the ball is designed to come out. At both the college and NFL level we see a consistent reduction in the expected snap-to-throw time of the drops the player takes after the injury.
To learn more about how notable that is, read the full story …
Alex talked about this with Ryan Rubinstein and Andrew Oja on the latest episode of The Off The Charts Football Podcast. They also dove into Lincoln Riley's job security at USC, and evaluated Indiana's running back injuries. They also highlighted Iowa's excellent defensive metrics, pointed out Jaden Ball's statistical improvements, and debated the worst losses of the week.
Preview-wise they got into Pittsburgh-Virginia Tech, Alabama-Mississippi State, Kentucky-South Carolina, Michigan-Minnesota, and Ohio State-Iowa. See what stats they cited would be key to these matchups.
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