Allen Park — The mantra is “next man up,” but that’s more of a defense mechanism than a strategy. It’s a way of coping off the field as much as it is on it.
It’s dispassionate by design, because just about everyone knows what it feels like to be the man who goes down at some point in their career. And in a league often defined by its violence, no one wants to dwell on the seemingly inevitable consequence of it.
The injury rate in the NFL is 100 percent, as the saying goes. But while the statistical data — what there is of it, anyway — doesn’t always agree, after just two weeks of regular-season games this year, the injury list is littered with some of the league’s biggest names, many of them done for the year.