Malcolm Mitchell said blame him. This whole injury thing is his fault, Georgia’s star receiver insists. He knows this to be true because he has watched “Final Destination,” a horror movie in which several friends cheat death only to have death come after them.
“Think about it,” said Mitchell, a junior flanker from Valdosta. “It’s out of nowhere; it’s not expected; it’s a group of people that all do something commonly together, which is play football. They’re all guys that are close to each other, and the incidents just keep on rolling.”
Here Mitchell starts snapping his fingers repeatedly to signify the injuries that have befallen the Bulldogs this season.
“Me and (injured receiver) Justin (Scott-Wesley) are from down south together, 229 area code,” he continues. “Me and (injured tight end) Jay Rome, too. This summer me and (running back) Keith (Marshall) watched movies together every night; me and Aaron (Murray) have a quarterback-receiver relationship, always throwing the ball with each other. Put all those different scenarios together and you’ve got ‘Final Destination.’
“And it took our home-run season away from us.”
If it’s not readily apparent, Mitchell is a movie buff. And a bit of a jokester. But he also was the lead character in what has turned out to be a drama of a season for the Bulldogs. Or, at least the first character on screen.
Georgia lost Mitchell in the first quarter of the first game of the season, Aug. 31 at Clemson. He went down in the most bizarre of fashions, tearing the ACL in his right knee as he went up for a celebratory leap in the end zone after Todd Gurley had ripped off a 75-yard touchdown run on the Bulldogs’ second offensive possession of the game.
Mitchell limped to the sideline without a single catch or carry. He had been counted on for much, much more.
“It was just something that was meant to happen,” said Mitchell, who underwent reconstructive surgery Sept. 10. “It happened before I even got off the ground.”
And so the season went.
Since Mitchell went down in the season opener, the Bulldogs have had seven other players miss multiple games or be sidelined for the entire season with injuries. And most of them have been significant contributors to Georgia’s cause, especially from an offensive standpoint.
The Bulldogs lost tailback Todd Gurley for four games with an ankle injury, Marshall for the season with a knee injury, Scott-Wesley for the season with a knee injury and wide receiver Michael Bennett for three games with a knee injury.
Including players lost in preseason camp, Georgia has seen 14 players sidelined for multiple games with injuries. Ten of them were either starters or projected starters.
In losses to Vanderbilt and Missouri in October, five of the Bulldogs’ top offensive producers were out. A sixth, wide receiver Chris Conley, was injured on the last play of the game and missed the next two and most of a third.
And now quarterback Aaron Murray is out. The record-setting senior suffered a season-ending knee injury Saturday against Kentucky. He and Scott-Wesley underwent surgery Tuesday morning.
“To have seven or eight guys that have been playing here and been counted on to makes plays, that’s crazy,” Mitchell said.
It has been more than a little consequential to the Bulldogs being in the situation that they are heading into the Georgia Tech game Saturday. They’re 7-4 and with no chance to win a championship or play in a BCS bowl. Georgia opened the season ranked No. 5 in the preseason AP poll and predicted to represent the Eastern Division in the SEC Championship game for a third consecutive year.
But injuries matter when it comes to wins and losses, particularly when they occur to offensive playmakers. That’s according to Bill Barnwell, an editor for a sports analytics service called Football Outsiders. They’ve conducted several studies of NFL data to quantify the effects of injury on team’s won-loss records.
Using a metric they call “History-Adjusted Games Lost,” Football Outsiders assigns values to injured players based on their position and production, factor in the number of games they miss and weigh it against the final won-loss record. Their base value is 1 for a regular player. It peaks at 1.75 for a perennial all-star and bottoms out at .25 for “a reserve of little note.” It also assigns higher values to offensive skill players than other positions.
Over the course of the season, a lost superstar “is worth about six or seven times as much of reserve,” Barnwell wrote in the New York Times in 2008. The actual quantification is too complicated to translate to college football, but suffice it say, with nine of Georgia’s leading offensive playmakers missing a combined 41 games this season, it has had a profound effect on the Bulldogs’ bottom line.
“It’s just unfortunate,” Georgia coach Mark Richt said. “It happens.”
Georgia isn’t the only team to incur the wrath of injuries. Florida has had 21 players miss games because of injury this season, including starters at quarterback, running back and receiver. It’s a big reason the Gators head into Saturday’s game against No. 2 FSU with a 4-7 record and coach Will Muschamp has his athletic director’s vote of confidence.
Richt doesn’t think Georgia’s practice or training methods have contributed to the rash of leg injuries. He believes the whole thing is just a fluke.
“I don’t think there’s anything you can do or anything we’ve done that would cause that type of thing,” he said. “If there’s scientific research out there that (there is), I’m sure it would already have been written by now.”
Mitchell doesn’t think so either. He has his own theories.
“I just think it’s a freak accident that happens to somebody on every team,” Mitchell said. “It just happened to a bunch of us. I just happened to be the first person it happened to. … Aaron’s happened when he was just running. You watch the play and you’re like, ‘where did it happen?’ ‘Final destination,’ man.”
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