Want to Avoid injury football and sports?

[GTech63]

As a highly regarded technical research institution, is our bio engineering department doing anything like the following article in SI. It seems a school like ours should be ahead of the curve. From what I have read in the past FSU seems to be.

http://www.si.com/nba/2014/12/23/marcus-elliott-p3-nba-injury-injury-analysis-data

One thing that stood out to me was being able to predict that an ACL injury was going to be a high probability. I confess I did not read the entire article because I saw it at Doctors office.

 

[Skeptic]

As much as we'd like to see fewer and less severe ACL tears, as long as we keep ladling muscle on bodies not meant to carry the weight or the physical stress, and athletes running faster and quicker, and ligaments and tendons that cannot be strengthened, only stretched, we are going to have them by the boatload. The Clemson QB and Snoddy's injuries are so eerily familiar -- both torn on cuts back to the right and the foot planted -- it is almost predictable for sure. Be interesting if anything at all can be determined, except, well, stuff happens.

 

[dcyellowjacket]

Snoddy broke his leg.

 

[GTech63]

As much as we'd like to see fewer and less severe ACL tears, as long as we keep ladling muscle on bodies not meant to carry the weight or the physical stress, and athletes running faster and quicker, and ligaments and tendons that cannot be strengthened, only stretched, we are going to have them by the boatload. The Clemson QB and Snoddy's injuries are so eerily familiar -- both torn on cuts back to the right and the foot planted -- it is almost predictable for sure. Be interesting if anything at all can be determined, except, well, stuff happens.

Per the article The indicators can be corrected before the occurrence. Means being taken out of line up but better that having the damage occur and then long time recovery.

This is all new, so data still being developed. But this seems to be an ideal Bio-engineering research project at GT.

 

[takethepoints]

I actually forwarded the article to a exercise therapy teacher I know. I think something like this would be useful for almost everybody as they age. I'd sign up tomorrow if I got the chance.

 

[Dirty Jacket]

This doesn't "predict injuries", it shows the anatomical imbalances that exist and allows him/her to train that deficiency so as to hopefully prevent an injury. That's what I took away. I think more than preventing injuries, this is an extremely powerful tool for athletes who want to identify their deficiencies (in general) and strengthen them. I imagine this system leads to very quick gains in the way of speed and strength.

FYI, Georgia Tech is on the forefront of concussion testing in the NCAA and NFL. The BMED department (Michelle LaPlaca) developed a sideline testing system that has received significant national attention spanning the last 10+ years.

 

[GTech63]

Thanks Did not know about the concussion test was developed by GT. I sent link of article to Prof LaPlaca. Thanks for her name.

 

[Old South Stands]

Look at how big (small) the guys were in the NFL 40 years ago. They look almost emaciated on film. The Pittsburgh Steelers of that day look small even compared to a team like Alabama today. In those days you heard of 'knee injuries' ending the careers of certain players like Gayle Sayers, but it didn't seem like they were that common. Injuries seemed mostly to be inflicted either by opposing players or by the artificial turf. More broken bones and dislocated shoulders than catastrophic knee injuries.

Regarding the size of players, I wished they didn't get so big, at least not as soon as they did... Some of the bigger college players when I was in grade school were about my dad's size (6'-1", 235 lbs). As a youngster playing Pop Warner in the '70s, I figured if I grew to be as tall as my dad (almost reached that @ 6'-0") and weighed at least 195 lbs (didn't hit that mark till well after college), and if I worked really, really hard, then I might be able to try out for the Jackets and make it as a walk-on. But alas, torn up knees + small, skinny frame... No chance against those guys from the late '80s. They were already getting huge!

It seemed the size, weight and strength of players started going through the roof for some reason in the mid '80s. Our H.S. varsity team in '81 had a 300+ offensive tackle, who was easily the largest and most powerful player for a AAA-school in the county. Saw no one else that entire season nearly as big as him, and he eventually went on to have a fairly long career with the Forty-Niners. After the Fridge went to Chicago, 300+ guys started popping up everywhere. Some running backs were tipping the scales at 230, 240, etc.

 

[Old South Stands]

Steelers Super Bowl 10 pre-game intro (re: NFL player size):

 

[GTHomer]

@Old South Stands, great points however I believe you should also add speed as an attribute that has also changed. When you consider larger bodies colliding at the speeds they do now, I'm not surprised by some of the injuries we see today.

 

[takethepoints]

A lot of this doesn't have as much to do with genetics as with rule changes.

Back in the late '60s Nebraska and a lot of the teams in the Mid-West commonly had teams with linemen every bit as big as you see today. I can remember seeing Bob Brown (6'4" 300) at guard against an Auburn team where the biggest DL weighed about 225. It hardly seemed fair.

But it was, because of the blocking rules. Brown had trouble with the Auburn DL he was blocking early because he had to actually hit him and the Tigger was wicked quick. Not any more. The whole "push-and-dance" form of blocking you see today - and the attendant huge OLs and DLs - came about because the NCAA and the pros decided to allow OLs to push off with their hands. In my day, that was an automatic 15; your hands couldn't leave your chest. Result = the smaller linemen of the past were suddenly incapable of running around the behemoths, cut blocking (when I played cut blocking was blocking) became superfluous, and the RBs had to get bigger as well. Then it was simply a matter of exercise and better diet to get to the problems we have today.

Well, too bad, so sad. We now have a game where the physics is becoming so dangerous that rules changes that will ruin the game (well, at least for people like me) are being contemplated. Add in the way the pro players want longer careers and bigger paydays and you have the sport in real danger of losing its edge. We'll have to see how all that works out.

 

[Old South Stands]

A lot of this doesn't have as much to do with genetics as with rule changes.

Back in the late '60s Nebraska and a lot of the teams in the Mid-West commonly had teams with linemen every bit as big as you see today. I can remember seeing Bob Brown (6'4" 300) at guard against an Auburn team where the biggest DL weighed about 225. It hardly seemed fair.

But it was, because of the blocking rules. Brown had trouble with the Auburn DL he was blocking early because he had to actually hit him and the Tigger was wicked quick. Not any more. The whole "push-and-dance" form of blocking you see today - and the attendant huge OLs and DLs - came about because the NCAA and the pros decided to allow OLs to push off with their hands. In my day, that was an automatic 15; your hands couldn't leave your chest. Result = the smaller linemen of the past were suddenly incapable of running around the behemoths, cut blocking (when I played cut blocking was blocking) became superfluous, and the RBs had to get bigger as well. Then it was simply a matter of exercise and better diet to get to the problems we have today.

Well, too bad, so sad. We now have a game where the physics is becoming so dangerous that rules changes that will ruin the game (well, at least for people like me) are being contemplated. Add in the way the pro players want longer careers and bigger paydays and you have the sport in real danger of losing its edge. We'll have to see how all that works out.

Interesting. Never really thought about that... In the early days we were always told to 'grab our jerseys' while blocking so we didn't get a flag. Wasn't big enough to play varsity, so don't know what their rules were, but we couldn't use our hands on the 8th-grade team in '80. Remember those 15-yard penalties well -- and the laps that went along with them at practice the next Monday. When did that rule change hit college? The '80s?

 

[zhavenor]

Interesting. Never really thought about that... In the early days we were always told to 'grab our jerseys' while blocking so we didn't get a flag. Wasn't big enough to play varsity, so don't know what their rules were, but we couldn't use our hands on the 8th-grade team in '80. Remember those 15-yard penalties well -- and the laps that went along with them at practice the next Monday. When did that rule change hit college? The '80s?

The pros changed the rules on blocking with the hands in 1978 mostly to improve pass blocking. It trickled down at various rate depending on the state, for high school football. I don't know for sure when college changed.

 

[Northeast Stinger]

I too remember those old blocking rules. Was told by teammates that some teams even had little straps sewn on jerseys for offensive player to grab hold of to help him keep his arms in and elbows out.

One of my all time favorite football games was (I know some of you have heard me say this before) was the 1966 Sugar Bowl game between Nebraska and Alabama. Nebraska's line outweighed Alabama on both sides of the ball from 25-35 pounds a player. Alabama even had an All American guard who only weighed 195. Coach Bryant was asked how his team was going to be able to stay on the same field with Nebraska and he famously replied, "We're going to out quick them." Indeed they did, 34-7. Point was, different blocking rules in those days and quickness was more valuable than it is today.

 

[ClydeBrick]

Want to avoid injuries in football?? Only play in the Pro Bowl.

 

[IEEEWreck]

This is a pretty fertile area of research between ECE and BME. I'm reasonably sure that most of the research professors doing this kind of thing are ECE, but ECE and BME are pretty close as departments, and there's a lot of joint papers being submitted to IEEE EMBS on the subject. Of course, there may be 3 different CoC labs doing the same thing and no one in the CoE knows about it, because... institutional politics.

A lot of what the article talks about is 10 year old tech that anyone with 2000 level classes in programming and signal processing could recreate. There's even an open source library for that.

The problem is that there's so much noise introduced by the detection method and so little data being collected that you don't really wind up with a uniquely useful tool. Can it show you bad jumping form? Absolutely. Can it show you bad form that a physical trainer watching the same video couldn't identify? Probably not, at least not right now. Some of the more intriguing research involves using algorithms that track many, many variables and iteratively choose the maximum explanatory variable, minimum covariance models. That may well push this technology a big step further.

However, keep in mind that this is a tool for analysis, not a scrying stone for perfect throws. Finite element models many, many time more accurate than the basic 'hips, knees, ankles, feet' are used to iteratively improve aircraft models, etc. But it's small and diminishing improvements- you still have to do design work. And these are people, not airframes. Strengthening a muscle is straightforward. Relearning a motion less so.

The really exciting area (shameless plug for my own research here) is in networks of sensors. The human eye can get a good 95% accuracy on slow motion video. The remaining 5% that quantifying that video gets you might not be all that important by itself, but if you combine it with a pulse oximeter and ballistocardiogram or ekg and bioimpedance data you can start to find some pretty interesting things that is really not obvious from each data set individually. My research is in disease detection, but I can totally see quantifying biosignals in a game environment as a huge advantage. We all think we're heroes who will win the game, but what if there was a data set on our right guard that shows his performance changes in the following concrete ways as his pulse ox drops. Makes substituting him a lot more clear a decision, right? Even more so, a lot of injury comes from bad form caused by degraded performance, so you'd be able to see red flags on guys who are so tired they're playing dangerously.

 

[GTpdm]

This is a pretty fertile area of research between ECE and BME. I'm reasonably sure that most of the research professors doing this kind of thing are ECE, but ECE and BME are pretty close as departments, and there's a lot of joint papers being submitted to IEEE EMBS on the subject. Of course, there may be 3 different CoC labs doing the same thing and no one in the CoE knows about it, because... institutional politics.

A lot of what the article talks about is 10 year old tech that anyone with 2000 level classes in programming and signal processing could recreate. There's even an open source library for that.

The problem is that there's so much noise introduced by the detection method and so little data being collected that you don't really wind up with a uniquely useful tool. Can it show you bad jumping form? Absolutely. Can it show you bad form that a physical trainer watching the same video couldn't identify? Probably not, at least not right now. Some of the more intriguing research involves using algorithms that track many, many variables and iteratively choose the maximum explanatory variable, minimum covariance models. That may well push this technology a big step further.

However, keep in mind that this is a tool for analysis, not a scrying stone for perfect throws. Finite element models many, many time more accurate than the basic 'hips, knees, ankles, feet' are used to iteratively improve aircraft models, etc. But it's small and diminishing improvements- you still have to do design work. And these are people, not airframes. Strengthening a muscle is straightforward. Relearning a motion less so.

The really exciting area (shameless plug for my own research here) is in networks of sensors. The human eye can get a good 95% accuracy on slow motion video. The remaining 5% that quantifying that video gets you might not be all that important by itself, but if you combine it with a pulse oximeter and ballistocardiogram or ekg and bioimpedance data you can start to find some pretty interesting things that is really not obvious from each data set individually. My research is in disease detection, but I can totally see quantifying biosignals in a game environment as a huge advantage. We all think we're heroes who will win the game, but what if there was a data set on our right guard that shows his performance changes in the following concrete ways as his pulse ox drops. Makes substituting him a lot more clear a decision, right? Even more so, a lot of injury comes from bad form caused by degraded performance, so you'd be able to see red flags on guys who are so tired they're playing dangerously.

This is why I love Georgia Tech...

 

[alaguy]

A lot of this doesn't have as much to do with genetics as with rule changes.

Back in the late '60s Nebraska and a lot of the teams in the Mid-West commonly had teams with linemen every bit as big as you see today. I can remember seeing Bob Brown (6'4" 300) at guard against an Auburn team where the biggest DL weighed about 225. It hardly seemed fair.

But it was, because of the blocking rules. Brown had trouble with the Auburn DL he was blocking early because he had to actually hit him and the Tigger was wicked quick. Not any more. The whole "push-and-dance" form of blocking you see today - and the attendant huge OLs and DLs - came about because the NCAA and the pros decided to allow OLs to push off with their hands. In my day, that was an automatic 15; your hands couldn't leave your chest. Result = the smaller linemen of the past were suddenly incapable of running around the behemoths, cut blocking (when I played cut blocking was blocking) became superfluous, and the RBs had to get bigger as well. Then it was simply a matter of exercise and better diet to get to the problems we have today.

Well, too bad, so sad. We now have a game where the physics is becoming so dangerous that rules changes that will ruin the game (well, at least for people like me) are being contemplated. Add in the way the pro players want longer careers and bigger paydays and you have the sport in real danger of losing its edge. We'll have to see how all that works out.

Points,
You are DEAD-ON.With the rule change, all really needed was 5 fat guys with long arms to form a wall around a 6-4 QB with a strong arm to have a good Offense(elcome to new passing records) .Of course, the OLs even got bigger but also better at movement.Guys that were 230 in hi school WANTED to get to 280-300 since the rule change.Before they wanted to stay smaller and quicker on their feet.

 

[MidtownJacket]

This is interesting - I am young enough to not have been around for that era of football but it is very interesting to me.. I used to play Rugby and on the whole it sounds like their players are more like the prototypical player of old

 

[danny daniel]

This is interesting - I am young enough to not have been around for that era of football but it is very interesting to me.. I used to play Rugby and on the whole it sounds like their players are more like the prototypical player of old

I played on a 7-3 Georgia HS team (highest competition level at the time) where the biggest player in the starting 22 was 195# and we had 2 starters at 135# that played both ways full time (our 135# QB did not play D). One other guy was 190# and both ends were 155#. One of the 135# players was an OG and MLB. Like the Bear said: "WE HAD TO OUT QUICK-UM". Times have changed!