The Baltimore Ravens went through one of the most injury-ravaged seasons in team history in 2021. They lost multiple high-level starters before the season even began, and the ailments never slowed down over the course of the year.
The organization wanted to do what they could to reduce the number of injuries throughout their team, making multiple key training changes in the offseason that were implemented throughout the year. During his end of season press conference with general manager Eric DeCosta, head coach John Harbaugh discussed how the methods panned out and the injuries surrounding the team.
“I’ll take that one. We did really well this year with injuries. Lamar [Jackson] had his injury, but if you look at the number of soft tissue injuries and other injuries, this has been our best year in quite a long time. So, the changes that [executive vice president & general manager] Eric [DeCosta] made, the changes that we made, the protocols we put in were incredibly successful. A lot of the early season injuries that we had were guys coming off the injuries from the previous year. We had Ronnie [Stanley] coming off the previous year, Tyus [Bowser] coming off the previous year, Marcus [Peters] coming off the ACL, both running backs [J.K. Dobbins & Gus Edwards] coming off the injuries from the previous year. Those were the early season issues that we had. As those guys got back out there, we didn’t add a lot of injuries towards the end of the year. As a matter of fact, we were the healthiest we were all year at the end of the season. So, I thought we did a great job through training camp, did a great job through the season with injury prevention, maintenance. We did some things that were even a little different than some of the normal protocols, that were tested and tried and true, that our people – [football performance coach] Sam Rosengarten and our trainer, [head certified athletic trainer] Adrian Dixon and [head strength & conditioning coach] Steve Saunders and [director of sports nutrition] Sarah Snyder – all put in place that were just incredibly effective. So, we’re definitely on the right track with that, and we had a good year in that sense, in terms of improving from the previous two years.”
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