Backup center discussion

[Schneed10]

Originally Posted by GMScud

Well, I never said we were due for a totally injury-free season. But I think the chance of repeating the rash of injuries in consecutive seasons is much more remote than just randomly have one such season. The Law of Averages talks about random events evening things out. I simply said that given how ravaged we were last season, it would be that much more unlikely for it to occur again. And the Law of Averages agrees with that, as an "average" amount of injuries this year would mean far less than last year for us.

You, sir, are a subscriber to the gambler's fallacy. Out of respect for all things Warpath, I refuse to down THAT road again. But I will ask you this:

If you flip a coin and it lands on heads, what is the likelihood that it will land on heads on the NEXT flip?

If you answered anything other than 50%, you'd be wrong.

The fact that an event just occurred does nothing to change the probability of it occurring in the future.

You're right in saying that the probability of having two injury-ravaged seasons in a row is much lower than having one. But that's not the issue: the issue is will this ONE season coming up in 2008 be injury-ravaged? We're not looking at two at the same time, we're looking at one season. We're looking at the NEXT coin flip. What happened last season has no bearing, the odds remain the same.

The law of averages states that things even out. This does tend to be true, but only over TIME with large enough samples. Meaning if you look at the Skins over the next 30 seasons or so, we'll approach the average number of games missed. But we're talking about one season, about one coin flip. The odds remain the same.

The fact that we got so injured last year does not help us, nor does it hurt us, going into this season.