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Cleveland Browns defensive end, Desmond Bryant, will likely miss the season with a torn pectoral muscle that he injured while lifting weights. He underwent surgery on Tuesday, per si.com.
Okay, you may ask, why is this story about the Browns on the DN?
Well, you may recall the last couple years that our Vikings have also had players suffer pec injuries at an alarming rate. In the 2014 and 2015 seasons, the following players suffered pectoral injuries: Phil Loadholt, Brandon Fusco, Brian Robison, Carter Bykowski, and Josh Robinson.
Who was our strength and conditioning coach for those years? Evan Marcus. The Vikings brought him on board in 2014 as our strength and conditioning coach, and he remained until he was fired in January of this year. After leaving here, Mr. Marcus went to...........Cleveland! Cleveland hired Evan Marcus as their strength and conditioning coordinator earlier this year, per dawgsbynature.com.
The following graph was created by the folks at SimpleTherapy:
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Let's look and see how often a team should expect to see a player go down with a pec injury. I couldn't find 2015 data (or even 2014, for that matter), but according to a story on mashable.com, there were over 1,300 injuries in the 2013-2014 regular season. Of those 1,300+, only 11 were pectoral injuries (probability of .008391), so the odds of a team having five of those injuries in 2 years are quite low. If there are 1,300 injuries for 32 teams, each team should, on average, suffer 40.625 injuries per year. The probability of a pec injury being one of those injuries is .340884375 (40.625 x .008391). So basically, one out of every three teams should suffer a pec injury in a given season. We suffered 2.5 per year while Evan Marcus was our S&T coach, which is about 7x higher than the average).
Now, I'm not saying that he had anything to do with Bryan'ts injury, as I couldn't find any evidence that he worked directly with Bryant. I'm just thinking that it's a hefty coincidence that he's here when we suffered 5 pec injuries in 2 years, and he's now in Cleveland in his first off-season there, and they've suffered a torn pec already. It'll be interesting to keep our eye on the situation over there.