One Thing The Rams Did Really Well Accidentally

Mr. Birkhead recently tallied up the votes for the Turf Show Times 2012 MVP, giving the award to Sam Bradford. Mistakenly, I'm afraid.

No, the MVP (Most Valuable Property) of the Rams this year was Not Getting Injured (casually referred to as NG-Three for absolutely no sensible reason).

In this graphically sexy post over at Deadspin (a site you likely don't know of because they don't write anything that people read ever), you can see the Rams were incredibly fortunate in respect to injuries this season. They posted the third-lowest reported injuries per week and fifth-lowest rate of players who didn't play on average. Any time you make the top five, or bottom five in the case of unfavorable metrics, that's really, really good.

Easy visual comparison that tells you how fortunate the Rams were -- check out Pro Football Reference's injury chart for the Rams this year. Now look at the one for the Packers. Lady Luck liked us this season.

As for any takeaways, that's tough. I'm not sure the Rams did anything particular to improve their physical fortunes this season. For the most part, injuries tend to be pretty fluky in football. Sure there are plenty of guys like Danny Amendola whose physical makeup and/or style of play (read: how they take/give collisions) lends itself to injury. I would guess that the overwhelming majority of players don't fit in that category. And sure, like the Jacob Bell concussion in the 2011 preseason, there are injuries that result due to poor form or execution.

But my guess, and feel free to disagree and toss some research in the comments for those of you so inclined, is that most injuries boil down to serendipity.

And at least for one season, the Rams found plenty of it.