Preface / Method to the Madness: Why we do what we do

Welcome to the newest Edition of The Fantasy Doctors Injury Draftguide, a collection of information, research and expertise that is focused on injuries within football and medical reviews of over 200 players with a focus on fantasy football. The purpose of this book, if you will, is to give you insight into the various injuries of the game that we both love, American football. I write this a a fan, an avid fantasy football player, as well as a sports medicine physician who treats NFL players regularly in my private clinic in Miami.

It’s easy to forget that these players are in the top 1% of athletes in the entire world. They are paid lucratively for a short period of time to perform consistently at a very high level while indirectly torturing their body. The average career length for a running back in the NFL is around three years. Many of these players are already retired from their sport by their late 20s, when most of us have not even begin to scratch the surface of our career.

Injuries in the NFL are unfortunately inevitable. A vicious game where super-fit athletes run full speed at each other over 50 times a game results in injuries as a unfortunate but expected outcome. Getting through the season is a grind, like every week is a new battle in a war. Rarely do guys have the luxury of taking time off for minor injuries, as they get at most 1-2 days truly off per week, only one ‘bye’ week a season. It’s non-stop torture from mid-August through January. I would estimate, based on my experience with players, that we only know about 25% of the injuries that are made public. Imagine learning truly how injured these guys are and how they continue to perform at such a high level. That’s what makes them so special.

The greatest predictor of future injury is past injury. That’s the main reason we spend 100s of hours researching each of the players’ injuries, to provide you with the most updated list of a player’s past injuries to help paint a picture of the player’s future injury risk. It’s by no means perfectly accurate, as anything rarely is, but remember we are only giving a small piece of the story.

As you’re reading through these pages and referencing the profiles, I want you to always keep one idea in the back of your head to refer back to. That is, at the end of the day these players are pawns in a very expensive game of chess.

They are for the most part easily replaceable and interchangeable, regardless of how elite they are. Sad but true. Eventually most players realize this in their late 20s, but many of them are naïve upon initially entering the league.

As someone who has the credentials and skillset to be a NFL team physician, whose mentor is a team physician himself, I have a deep understanding of the intricacies of injuries behind the scenes in the NFL. After all, these players are employees of the team, and the goal of the medical team is not to fully treat or prevent future injury unfortunately, but instead to get the player healthy enough to return to the field at a relatively high rate.

This in itself is the main issue of why I personally am not on a team’s medical staff. Too much politics, not enough medical freedom, where transparency is scarce. Rarely are the players provided true fixes, but instead bandaids to help them make it through the season. My goal, as the Chief Medical Officer of The Fantasy Doctors, is to shed light on what these players are actually dealing with, by reading between the lines. To help paint a picture of when the player could return to the field, their rate of reinjury, and their expected effectiveness when they do so.

No information in this book, or any of our content, is confidential. Each piece of information that we use has been made public. We utilize our understanding of the injuries, clinical experience, knowledge of the game and medical expertise to help describe exactly what these players are dealing with.

Thank you for purchasing this book, and I hope you find this a valuable resource that you can reference regularly in the future.

-Dr. Morse

About the Team

Let me tell you a little bit about our team at The Fantasy Doctors and why we are the best people to be taking injury advice from. At the end of the day, that’s what you are getting out of this, advice.

The Fantasy Doctors is the only group of orthopedic and sports medicine trained physicians and surgeons in the world that review, analyze and discuss injuries to professional athletes from all the different sports, ranging from football to basketball to soccer and even cricket!

The founder, Dr. Selene Parekh is an orthopedic surgeon who specializes in the foot and ankle at Duke University. Dr. Parekh performs many of the surgeries that we discuss daily, including ankle fractures (think Dak Prescott), turf toe (think Patrick Mahomes) and LisFranc sprains (think Joe Mixon) just to name a few. Oftentimes you will see him in scrubs in between surgeries recording his thoughts on a specific injury or player, for you!

Dr. Jesse Morse is a sports medicine physician that specializes in regenerative medicine (‘stem cells’) located in Miami, FL. Most of his practice revolves around professional athletes, and he sees NFL players almost everyday.

While we will never use any personal or private health-related information in our advice, being able to see and treat these injuries (and so many more unknown to the public) helps significantly with understanding what they are dealing with, the severity, possible complications and what types of treatments it will take to get them back on the field.
Mike Valverde has been contributing to fantasy football content for over 20 years now and has a wealth of knowledge and expertise that he brings to the team. He is our performance and player analysis expert, and he wrote the performance part of the profiles.

There are numerous other valuable members of The Fantasy Doctors team, so many to mention. Just know that they are working hard to deliver you the most accurate, timely and injury-related information available.

Alright, let’s get started!

The Fantasy Doctors, 2021 - All Rights Reserved www.TheFantasyDoctors.com