by Zach Binney
In a sport as chaotic and violent as the NFL, the goal of predicting which players are going to get injured is both a Holy Grail and, to date, wholly unattainable with public data. While we have written many articles that identify risk factors for injuries -- weight, prior injury history, position and age, to name a few -- we have not written about a model that allows us to successfully predict which individual players will stay healthy or get hurt. That's partly because if we had such a model it would be too valuable to share freely, but also because our efforts to date have come up short.