NFL injury analysts aren’t just making stuff up; but X can make it seem like they are

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Before Week 7 of the NFL season could get under way, Dr. Jesse Morse unknowingly found himself in a tense situation: arguing with Christian Watson’s father, Tazim Wajid Wajed, about if the wide receiver had a high ankle sprain or not. By far the most awkward interaction was this exchange, before Morse realized who he was talking to.

“It WAS NOT a high ankle sprain. That was just what they initially thought it was,” wrote Wajed.

“I watched the video, yes, it was,” replied Morse on X (formerly Twitter).

He clearly did not know — and claims he could not have known — that Wajed was Watson’s father and thus would have more accurate diagnostic information not yet released to the public. Morse was immediately clowned off the face of the earth, with posts, articles and memes instantly defining that day’s viral moment.

For many, Morse’s gaffe appeared to open the hood to a larger world of social media injury analysis, particularly concerning players like Watson, whom innumerable fantasy football teams may be relying on to suit up. In football, where injuries are ubiquitous, having informed analysis about the status of a certain player may give an edge in a game that is only a little more skill-based than a slot machine.

While it would be easy to take Morse’s instant rejection of a contrary opinion as evidence that he and others like him are just making stuff up, much of this content is real, qualified and data-driven. But the delivery certainly makes it hard to tell.

This kind of content has exploded in recent years, expanding out of a niche created by forerunner’s like Stephania Bell of ESPN and David Chao, a controversial former NFL team doctor rebranded “ProFootballDoc” online. Yet its expansion has also led to confusion, skepticism and platform limitations, with simple outlets like X making it impossible to communicate the complexities of injuries in 280 characters.

After Week 1, I was curious for my own fantasy football team what the outlook on Rams wide receiver Puka Nacua’s injury, and when checking for any new information, I came across this post on X by Edwin Porras, a licensed physical therapist and injury content creator.

I was immediately skeptical. The post was short, snappy and seemed to project a high level of certainty from nothing more than a slow motion video. Porras had several possible timelines, historical comparisons and even a potential mechanism of injury to point to. How on earth could he project such confidence without treating Nacua himself?

But when I reached out to Porras to ask about his content, he explained what goes into a post like that; internal data collected over years of injury timelines, positional specifics and his own professional understandings of mechanisms of sports injuries such as a bursa sac in Nacua’s case. Unlike Morse’s brazen claim in the face of a detractor, Porras made sure I understood the limitations of injury videos.

“Video analysis and watching an injury is not diagnostic by any means,” said Porras.

Porras got into the injury analysis space because he felt there was a hole for more specific injury data when all most fans get are a few words and then an official designation from practice reports. “Puka Nacua (knee) – Questionable” does not provide much to a fantasy football player.

“I felt like there was a void in the space at the time in providing more objectivity in terms of what is actionable,” said Porras. “It’s nice to know ‘okay we can generally expect this amount of [time] because of this injury,’ but I wanted to know what are they going to look like when they come back? Why are they still limited? What are the chances this injury is going to linger?”

This type of content is not an exact science, nor do Porras and others believe it is. Jeff Mueller, also a licensed physical therapist and content creator, told me just that when I asked him about Lions tight end Sam Laporta, who he said likely would not play with an inversion sprain. Laporta ended up playing that week, which Mueller noted as an example of the inexactness of this type of work.

“Video is not diagnostic, and I was very much relying on his response,” said Mueller about Laporta. “He was carted off the sideline… looking at my database with injury data, typically even tight ends miss close to two weeks with inversion sprains.”

Like Porras, Mueller relies on his own database to project injury timelines. He then pairs this with video analysis and reported information about the players’ response — which in Laporta’s case required him to be carted to the locker room — to make a final call.

“There’s a good chance he misses this game since he only has really six days to recover, right?” said Mueller. “Well, sure enough, I’m wrong.”

But while Porras and Mueller were candid about the inexactness of injury content, X simply does not allow them the room to make this clear as often as they should. For an untrained consumer like myself, reading a tweet claiming that Sam Laporta likely won’t play or that Puka Nacua is “highly unlikely” to miss 8+ weeks with this injury seems pretty certain.

Speed is also essential to maximize engagement, as concerned fantasy players like myself will be ravenous for analysis as soon as these injuries happen, which will inherently make less-accurate content seem just as certain to me.

“I tried to move away a couple of years ago from trying to be the first to just trying to get it right,” said Porras. “Because again, there’s already a high margin of error for these kinds of things. And if I’m rushing myself to sort of identify exactly what I think is going on, then that’s not good for anybody.”

Others handle content creation differently. Dr. Deepak Chona, an orthopedic surgeon and designer of SportsMedAnalytics.com, got into the world because he himself was a football fan and wanted to apply his background to this world. But he is a full-time medical professional, as are Porras and Mueller, and Chona does not follow or maintain his injury content during his normal work day.

Chona also recognizes the issue with perceived accuracy, though he is confident he can project with roughly 85 to 90 % confidence, and Mueller cited similarly high numbers. However, Chona explained how individualized this can be from case to case, and that those types of confidence intervals cannot be universally applied.

“Each player had a totally different level of detail on the input that we were putting in [to our projections],” said Chona. “If you’re comparing like some player where they’ve had 10 practices and five [injury] reports versus some player where they just have three practices and one [injury] report, and you can’t really call that apple to apple.”

Chona, Porras and Mueller all openly explained the inexactness of injury analysis and the difficulties which projecting patients that they don’t have their hands on directly. But whatever their intentions, injury analysis content is communicated in a way that keeps this unclear. And it’s not their fault, either.

One constant I noticed across injury content is brevity, a function of trying to fit a large range of players and outcomes onto a tiny, social media-friendly post. Mueller used green or red emojis to indicate if a player would likely play or not, a visual aid to those just skimming through his posts. Chona produces long threads on Saturdays for each week’s slate of games with a short blurb for each player, while Porras will often quote-tweet reports and offer short, three-or-four line analysis.

By no means does this brevity make it wrong or less informed; much of this content is based on large amounts of data, professional understanding of complex injuries and real-world experience with athletes. But it doesn’t leave room to explain that to people like me, and so when someone like Morse confuses an NFL player’s father for just another internet troll, it can lead to a wholesale questioning of the industry’s credibility.

I was personally blown away by the level of detail these analysts are getting into when creating this content. Long-maintained spreadsheets, databases, computer algorithms all mesh with trained medical professionals to create a unique content space where doctors and physical therapists can interact with football fans and those trying to gain an edge in their fantasy league.

“I’ve always viewed it as similar to Matthew Berry coming up with weekly rankings. It’s all based on projection, right?” said Mueller. “Even those can still be wrong.”

It meshes beautify with the fantasy football world, which is all about making educated guesses. Hopefully, if players like me and professionals like them can start to understand each other better, than we can all get the best out of this special type of interaction. With how random it is, fantasy football already feels like having maximally invasive surgery. But maybe now I can get a fantasy football doctor to make it a little better.