Signal vs Noise

The Injury Report, Decoded

Questionable usually means playing. Knees haunt a season more than hamstrings do. And a concussion listing is the one tag where the decision is out of the coach's hands.

The Friday ritual is universal: scroll the injury report, see the Q next to your player's name, spiral. The report is actually one of the most readable documents in football, once you know which parts carry signal. The tag is the weakest part. The body part is the strongest.

Questionable mostly means playing

Since 2016, a quarterback, back, receiver, or tight end listed Questionable has gone on to record a stat line that week more often than not in every single season, between 54.7 and 68.4 percent of the time. The reason is bureaucratic: when the league retired the Probable tag in 2016, its population of expected-to-play players had to go somewhere, and it flowed into Questionable. The tag now spans everyone from true coin flips to near locks. One fence: under the old vocabulary, 2009 through 2015, the same measurement ran 47.5 to 58.2 percent, roughly a coin flip. The modern Q is a softer warning than the one your instincts were trained on.

The body part outranks the tag

A concussion listing usually ends in Out because the coach does not make that call: a listed player has to clear an externally gated, multi-step return protocol that rarely compresses into the same week. A shoulder listing is a pain-tolerance injury that players routinely manage with padding and a long Sunday morning, so it mostly resolves to playing. Before you react to any tag, read the injury next to it.

The tag tells you what the team must disclose. The body part tells you what the injury is going to do.

The hamstring folklore, checked

Fans treat the hamstring as a season-long curse that keeps coming back. Track every player who lands on the report and returns later the same season with the same body part after a clean gap of three or more weeks, and hamstrings re-list about 10 percent of the time (300 of 3,041 cases), while knees re-list 13.9 percent of the time (795 of 5,702). The haunted joint is the knee. The hamstring's reputation comes from where it strikes, not how often it returns.

Because where it strikes really is special: the hamstring is the sprinter's injury, and football's sprinters are receivers and the corners who chase them. Those two positions carry 31 to 50 percent of the league's hamstring listings in any given season, against 22 to 25 percent of every other kind of listing, a gap that has pointed the same way in every season on record and was widest in 2020. That comparison controls for how often those positions appear on reports at all, so it is not just rosters being full of receivers. When you hear hamstring, think speed, not curse.

How to use it: read the report in this order. Body part first, because concussion means plan without him and shoulder means probably fine. Tag second, remembering the modern Questionable plays more often than it sits. And when the hamstring news hits your fast receiver, worry about the position making a repeat likely somewhere on the roster, not about a curse following the one player.