Could Cleveland Failure Be Linked To Medical Failures?

Valid point. This is also very much the case with the Buffalo Bills (a more local team to me, so i get their news). The injuries take on year after year are ABSOLUTELY astounding. Their traning staff should seriously all be fired.

Could the situation in Cleveland be similar?
Possibly.

I would agree that there seem to be many “higher- caliber” teams that don’t struggle with repeated cycle of injury as do some others.

I think the crazy staph infection problems were one reason that our medical staff might be less than superior. However, with all the credit the Cleveland Clinic gets, you would think this wouldn’t be the case. If you have one of the best hospitals in your town, you would think the medical staff would be top notch.

 At least there hasn’t been any outbreaks of staph recently.

I know injuries are part of the game, but it’s quite possible the medical staff isn’t doing their best to prevent and treat them.

I would have to see our number of injuries and such compared to other teams to be convinced of this.

I said NO.

A couple injuries from some decent starters may not ruin your season. Now depth becomes a factor. There are many teams that have a starter go do down and then have a backup start rippin’ it up. We don’t really have that capability.
 
I don’t blame the roster, I blame the management.

I wanted to thank everyone for the great comments so far on each side of the ball, so to speak. I actually didn’t get the piece as refined as I wanted, as I was at work on a keyboard missing a shift key (of course, lol).

I wanted to hit a few things to follow up on some of your posts, for the sake of thoroughness.

The number I cited from SI was actually the individual reports per injury since preseason. So, anything that was reported to the NFL popped up on the list. This may account for the number being so high. As to comparison to other teams, I briefly looked and took the mean average of five random teams and compared. The browns were at least 20% higher in terms of the number of reports. I would love to go more in depth than that, and originally I was going to tally and average the injuries by season since the expansion year, but I just couldn’t find what I was looking for.

I would agree that another part of the problem I didn’t mention was the training staff, but that’s only because I didn’t consider them to be different. On most teams, the training staff is hired as medical, almost like a physical therapy department in a hospital. I’ve thought for over a decade that poor conditioning was a key problem for the browns (especially during the Crennel era).

As for recently, I feel like an inability to keep the players out of harm post injury has been a problem. I think we can all admit that Cleveland’s team outside of the first team offense and defense is rather poor (or at least pre-season alluded to that). So, I’m not surprised that a few key injuries here and there (most notably in the offensive and defensive lines) can cause quite a few problems when the backups just aren’t calibur players.

The point I wanted to hit on was that these injuries are a reoccurring event, year after year. I cannot think of a single season since 2001 where I didn’t see a Browns headline making a pun on their injury woes. Is there a quick fix? No. Cleveland fired their head physician back in spring of 2009. Whether this was linked to the staph problem is hard to see.

I remain an optimist however, much like the rest of Cleveland. What else do we have?