Cromartie Bruises Knee

Antonio Cromartie [1] has a bruised knee, and while he might not miss time, he's certainly not going to be 100 percent for a while.

We normally don't link minor injury XPs like this one, but I wanted to talk about something related to Cromartie and how it affects the Chargers projection. In the past, A.J. Smith has showed a willingness to take players with medical red flags that others might have passed on; namely, Cromartie and Marcus McNeill [2].

It's been an interesting time since. McNeill's had some minor injuries here and there (only in football are broken hands a minor injury), but he's stayed pretty healthy, all things considered. Then again, the concern with him wasn't as much of a constant string of injuries as it was a concern that stenosis would eventually affect his career in the long-term.

Cromartie, on the other hand, came into the league with a torn ACL. Since then, he's played one year as a backup, had one fantastic season, played one year with a fractured hip, and is now having knee issues again.

At the moment, we don't have the ability to project how healthy teams will be, let alone how healthy an individual player might be. We don't project teams to be ridiculously healthy or injured, just to be league-average, and then incorporate the effects of that into our projection system. That's why it's always ridiculous to read things like "Oh, they didn't see Miami coming, so how can they be any good?"; of course we didn't see Miami coming last year, because Tom Brady [3] tore his ACL, Chad Pennington [4] got shipped over, and they had 48 guys on their roster or so stay healthy all season. If we'd had Miami's AGL total available to us at the beginning of the season, the effects predicted by my own research on injuries would suggest that they'd win about three more games than expected alone.

So looking at the Chargers and Rams predictions this year, perhaps we were naive to suggest that they'd be at a league-average level of health. Maybe not. It's something I know I'll be working on this offseason.