Every team has injuries, that's true.
But few teams have this extent of injuries and win a majority of their games.
Heck, it only took 1 injury to reduce the patriots to a middle of the pack team.
Which brings up the point that it often depends on where the injuries happen. Most of ours have been at defense and most with our best playmakers. That's going to effect our ability to stop people.
You can say "no excuses" all you want, but in reality, these injuries have changed the landscape of the beginning of the season.
Imagine it's anytime between 1995 and 2004. What if Favre went down. Would you have been surprised if that hurt our ability to win games?
Injuries are a part of the game. And like any part of the game, they effect the wins and losses.
"TimeToThink" wrote:
Thank you. It's not "making excuses", it's simply realizing that when you're missing some of your most important pieces the wins come a lot harder. Some teams get lucky, like the Giants did w/ Tuck and being able to shift another young guy back from OLB to DE and having him perform well. But w/ most teams, if you lose the kind of players we lost (not to mention the number of them -- we're talking half of our starting secondary, people), the record is going to suffer.
Again, that's not making an excuse -- I'm not a member of this team and I don't work for them, so there's no need for me to make any excuses for them. It's acknowledging that we're missing some very important pieces of our plan at the moment. That's not on Thompson or McCarthy; it's luck, or at worst an indication that we need to do some work w/ our strength and conditioning (which I don't buy, since we've been one of the healthiest teams in the league for the past couple seasons). Sometimes your luck goes really bad and you lose a LOT of important players. It happens.
Here's the bright side, though: Imagine what this team might be able to do once they get healthy. They're 2-3 now, not 0-4, and this isn't a strong division. If they get healthy they can definitely come back and win the division -- and if they're healthy in the playoffs, they can be
dangerous. Big 5 healthy and with the better part of a season playing together under their belts? I'd like to see that. Our secondary healthy, and Pat and Tramon having gained valuable on-field experience? I'd like to see that, as well.
The season's not over, by a long stretch, and injuries tend to heal. I'm going to stay optimistic for now.