Tom Brady, Tony Romo and Colt McCoy: Common QB injuries

Sports fans have been buzzing over New England Patriots quarterback Tom Brady’s limitations at practice, while he nurses an injured left shoulder. A concussion sustained three weeks ago has kept the Cleveland Browns’ Colt McCoy out of the game. And though Tony Romo of the Dallas Cowboys is expected to play the New York Giants this weekend, he’s been practicing with a wrap around his bruised hand.

When it comes to injuries, serving as quarterback is probably all it’s cracked up to be. (Quarterbacks, indeed, seem to have had it rough this year.) But each football player received a very different injury -- some, like concussions, more attention-grabbing than others.

To determine the nature of those injuries, a 2004 study published in the American Journal of Sports Medicine used the NFL Injury Surveillance system to survey 1,534 quarterback injuries. The researchers, from the Hospital for Special Surgery in New York, found that head injuries were the most common (15.4%), followed closely by shoulder injuries (15.2%).

As for how often an injury will take any given player out for the season: according to a 2008 study published in the same journal, from 1998 to 2007 the rate of season-ending injuries during games was 5.4 per 1,000 “athlete exposures.” As for all injuries great and small, players were injured 64.7 times for every 1,000 times they were exposed.

That’s better than another paper published earlier that year that looked at the 2002-05 period and found the game injury rate to be roughly double that, 111.3 per 1,000 athlete exposures, though that may be cold comfort for athletes currently sitting on the sidelines, waiting to heal.

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