Justice and football!

I'm a life long Saints fan and know this season will be a challenge. But to say the least the team is being used as a scapegoat for the league as its pending lawsuits on concussions. And I understand the standard of proof is not beyond a reasonable doubt, but if this is the "evidence" these players are getting shafted.

Commentary: The Saints ain't sinners

This spring, the football world was rocked by news of the organized bounty system operated by the New Orleans Saints over the last three seasons. The program allegedly involved cash payments for hits against targeted players on the opposing team...

...The NFL's penalties for the coaches are easy to justify. Their misbehavior has been well documented. But such harsh penalties for the players should require some evidence that the bounty system affected their on-field behavior, evidence that the Saints injured more players than the typical team. As Hargrove's agent, Phil Williams, pleaded to the league: "If these men have committed such grievous crimes that you have determined that their careers should be in danger and / or their names sullied, why be so secretive about the 'evidence' that you use to condemn them. ... Do you actually have any concrete evidence that any player from another team was injured as a result of a 'bounty' and that a player from the Saints was therefore paid accordingly?"

The NFL has still provided no such evidence. Looking at all of the NFL's evidence, we know that the bounty system existed, but we don't know whether it influenced the players' on-field behavior. Ultimately, the latter is an empirical question.

We collected data on player injuries for the 2009, 2010 and 2011 football seasons, those in question for the bounty scandal. Each week, teams publicly list a pregame injury report that catalogs every player who might have his performance affected by injury in that weekend's game. Collecting all of those reports provides fairly complete information regarding the timing and severity of player injuries.

With these lists, one can roughly pinpoint when a player was injured by identifying when he is added to an injury report. Though injuries might occur innocently and not technically be "caused" by one's opposition, a team that tends to injure more opponents should stick out in injury reports.

If the Saints tended to injure more players, then teams that played them would tend to list more injuries the following week. To test whether the Saints injured more players than a typical team, one need only compare the number of players added to injury reports after a Saints game to the league-wide average.

Did the New Orleans Saints injure more players?

The data-driven answer is a resounding "no." The Saints appear to have injured far fewer players over the 2009, 2010 and 2011 seasons. The numbers are striking. From 2009 to 2011, the Saints injured, on average, 3.2 opposing players each game. The rest of the teams in the league caused, on average, 3.8 injuries per game. This difference is highly statistically significant, or in other words, it would hold up in a court of law or a fancy academic journal. In each year of the bounty program, the Saints injured fewer players than the average for the league. In 2009, the Saints injured 2.8 players a game, and other teams injured on average 3.8. In 2010, it was 3.5 and 3.6, and in 2011 it was 3.3 and 3.8.

The Saints' behavior on the field was certainly aberrant, but positively so. Only one other team, the San Diego Chargers, injured fewer opponents per game over this entire time frame (3.1 injuries). Of the 32 teams, the Saints injured the third fewest in the 2009 season, the 15th fewest in 2010 and the third fewest in 2011. Might this record be linked to the Saints' being too weak or cowardly to respond to the bounties? Certainly not. Lily-livered players don't win Super Bowls.

However, the bounty system was run by the defense. Perhaps the offense was unusually kind to its opponents, offsetting the statistical misbehavior of the defense. That too is easily disproved with the data. Even if one focuses only on injuries to opposing offensive players, the Saints don't stand out as particularly vicious.

In 2009, the Saints injured far fewer offensive players than did other teams, at 0.9 per game as opposed to an average of 1.9 for other teams. But in 2010 and 2011, the Saints were statistically average, injuring slightly more offensive players in these seasons but no more than chance might allow. Over the three years, the Saints injured fewer offensive players than average...