This project uses NFL_Injuries data set from kaggle

The data set looks at ACL, MCL, and concussion injuries in the Nation Football League throughout the 2012-2019 seasons

This data was cleaned from 4 separate tables into 1 table with 5 columns being year, injury type, season phase, amount occurred during practice, amount occurred during game, and total amounts.

With this 3D plot we are able to see how the number of injuries compare to each other. Concussions are the most common of the three injuries and MCL injuries are more common than ACL injuries.

To see if there is a proportional relationship for concussions during the preseason and regular season, a bar chart was used as a visual. The code below is for the bar chart of concussion injuries by year and season phase:

plot_ly(
  data = concuss,
  x = ~year,
  y = ~total,
  color = ~season_phase,
  type = "bar"
) %>%
  layout(
    barmode = "group",
    title = "Concussion Injuries by Year and Season Phase",
    xaxis = list(title = "Year"),
    yaxis = list(title = "Total Injuries"),
    legend = list(title = list(text = "Season Phase"))
  )

Even with the preseason being about a month long compared to the 18 week regular season, most of the preseason injuries are close to the regular season concussion injuries.

ACL injuries seem to have a smaller range compared to MCL injuries. This can be due to ACL injuries occurring via non contact and MCL happening through contact

Football being a contact sport makes sense for concussions and MCL injuries to be more common than ACL injuries. Still the total number of ACL injuries during the regular season raises concerns for the type of field that the players play on. The support for natural grass fields over turf fields has been a proponent of this. ACL injuries coming from non contact sudden changes of direction lead fans and players to favor grass fields where the surface is more forgiving.

Concussions are easily the most common injury pre and regular season. Yes, football is a contact sport and this statistic is the reason for many rule changes

As a summary of the data, it shows like the majority of trends we saw that more concussion injuries occur throughout the regular season than the preseason. Concussions had a higher mean and a wider range meaning that due to competitiveness more concussion occur.

##    Min. 1st Qu.  Median    Mean 3rd Qu.    Max. 
##    71.0    82.0   107.0   120.2   157.0   192.0

## # A tibble: 2 × 6
##   season_phase mean_injuries median_injuries sd_injuries min_injuries
##   <chr>                <dbl>           <dbl>       <dbl>        <int>
## 1 Preseason              81               81        5.95           71
## 2 Regular               160.             162       26.6           123
## # ℹ 1 more variable: max_injuries <int>