This sucks. Maybe they go for Rainey. Let the rumours begin.
Can’t replace a player like Saunders. MAJOR big blow basically losing 2 All Star receivers to season ending injuries in 2 straight weeks. Get the patches out…
Rotten.
Saunders is a big loss, but when Tolliver took Saunders’ place against Toronto, our O was still moving the ball at will.
We already have WR Lawrence (who June Jones likes) to step in to a backup role. And Fillbert-Lussier (sp?) is a decent option. But I think Tillman clearly has to bring in another receiver capable of contributing if we run into more injuries in the receiving ranks.
A depleted receiving corps should not become an obstacle to this team getting to the Cup…which I think they are very capable of.
I like the idea of trading for Chris Rainey, but not if it costs us anything more than a third round pick, or a non-starter/neg list player.
One of the Chris Rainey articles claimed that part of Rainey’s fall from grace in BC was due to screwing up assignments as a receiver, which would be a huge liability in Jones’ offence.
As expected:
cfl.ca/transactions
ROSTER05-Sep-18
HAM ADD INT Rashad LAWRENCE (WR) Northwestern
HAM TRF TO INJURED INT Jalen SAUNDERS (WR) Oklahoma – to Oct-26^^ (13-Oct)
Torn ACL. We probably won't see him play again before next Labour Day.
The "good" news - with prompt medical treatment and proper physiotherapy, you can recover.
The "bad" news - many elite athletes push themselves too hard too early and end up causing more damage.
There seems to be serious injuries in every CFL game. I suspect that the game has become too dangerous to play and that the rules and the equipment need to be drastically modified .
8-12 months is the range to return. Adrian Petersen had ACL surgury in December and won the rushing title the following season.
THF Turf Demon strikes again :(Still think our stadium THF has had more ACL injuries then any other CFL playing field ?
I wonder if there is any hard emperical or statistical evidence that correlates the field turfs with the number of ACL injuries that have been occuring. Any data to suggest that playing on natural grass decreases the risk for this type of injury? I know in youth soccer some coaches recommend not using the traditional studded cleats on artificial turf. There is actually a less aggressive cleat out now designed to be more forgiving when sliding around and making cuts on artificial turf.
These ACL tears seem to be happening at an alarming rate. It usually affects the team but it is absolutely devestating for the player. Not only due to the long recovery but also because they might not ever return to form. It might be high time that pro sports starts to look into this and figures out how to implement an ACL reduction strategy. Otherwise leagues might be dealing with more class action lawsuits to go along with the concussion suits already happening.
EXPLETIVIVE, EXPLETIVIVE, EXPLETIVIVE! 
I've seen mixed reports when I've looked into this in the past, but here's a recent-ish study from Stanford that looked at injury records from the NCAA, and concludes that the risk of complete ACL tear is greater on so-called "third generation" artificial turf surfaces than on natural grass.
They talk about classification of surfaces into natural grass surfaces (though not all natural grass surfaces have identical properties), and first, second, and third generation artificual turf (third generation characterized as having long synthetic fibers and sand or rubber infill).
They also talk about the frequency of non-contact ACL injuries on artificial surfaces.
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.knee.2012.07.006
Fulltext PDF appears to be available for free through scholar.google.com:
Google Scholar
The incident rate of 1.73 ACL tears per 10000 athletes seems kind of low. On a typical CFL team you get at least a couple per year. If it's not the turf that is the problem then something else has to be causing it. Maybe cleats, training, or a cursed field? ;D
was actually going to comment on this earlier, but when the new turf got installed at IWS, there was a huge amount of hamstring injuries. Think there may be more of a correlation between the turf and knee injuries though.
Note that it’s not per 10000 athletes, it’s per 10000 “athlete-exposures”, where an athlete-exposure is defined as “one student-athlete participating in one practice or competition in which there was a possibility for athletic injury, regardless of the duration of that participation.”
We can rough out the number of “player-exposures” in the CFL as follows:
46 players per roster (yeah, only 44 on gameday, and some may not see the field, so tweak this variable if you want)
9 teams
18 regular season games
2 preseason games (though some play 3)
Let’s ignore the playoffs, though they can add up to 3 games for a participating team
3 practice sessions per regular season game
17 training camp practices
For simplicity, we’ll leave out practice roster players
That means each player has roughly 91 exposures in a season. Multiply that by 46 players per roster and 9 teams and you get approximately 37674 exposures in a season. Even if we round the player count per team down to 40, we still get 32760 exposures.
Based on 37674 exposures, a rate of 1.73 per 10000 would lead us to expect an average of 6.52 complete ACL tears league-wide per season (or with the lower exposure estimate, 5.67). Put another way, on average, we’d expect roughly one in every 63 CFL players (or with the other estimate, one in every 73 CFL players) to suffer a complete ACL tear every season.
You could argue that we might actually expect the risk per exposure to be higher in the CFL than NCAA, since overall the players in the CFL will tend to be bigger, stronger, and faster.
Anyone have the actual league-wide counts from the last few seasons?
Wow, safetyblitz. That is some great work you’ve done there. I would expect though that the CFL count is way higher than 6.52 league wide per season. We’ve had 4 or 5 receivers go down just in the last couple of weeks. We could just chalk it up to football being a much rougher sport but then we have seen players go down with little or no contact. LeFevour and Collaros come to mind. There are some ACL tears where the reason is obvious, like when Simoni rolled up on Norwood, but many of them are still of the phantom variety.
Were both Williams and Saunders injured on home turf?
As so many other Ti-Cats have been before like Zach Collaros with an ACL injury?
I believe The Tims Turf Monsters are at again!
Seems strange that this original design of turf that was put in for the Pan Am Stadium and the Tiger-Cats has had so many players go down with injury??
We wish Jalen and Chris all the best in their recoveries and look forward to seeing them back on the field again in Tiger-Town!!
GO CATS GO!!
The turf had nothing to do with either Williams' nor Saunders' injuries.
Williams ruptured his Achilles tendon by starting to run, something that can happen anywhere.
Saunders landed awkwardly (on one leg, on an angle) with a guy all over him, and his leg buckled when the combined weight hit the ground.
It's impossible to rule the turf out as a factor. Particularly in Saunders' case, the buckling of the knee is directly related to how much traction his cleat is getting against the turf. On a different surface, maybe his foot slides away sideways more, making his deceleration less abrupt and allowing his leg to move more freely at the hip, reducing the forces applied to the his knee ligaments.
The same principle is why airplanes are designed with wheels or skiis to land on. Try to land an airplane with landing gear composed of spikes that stick into the ground, instead of wheels, and see what happens.