How to deal with player injuries

Injuries are a part of life when you play football.  In MyFootballNow, you won't be playing for long before you have to deal with injuries on your team.  This entry will detail some information on how those injuries occur, what they mean for your team, and how best to handle injured players.

The first place you might notice a player injury is on your team roster page.  There is a column that shows each player's health status.  This can range from Healthy to Probable to Questionable to Doubtful to Out.  Players that are "Out" are unable to play; if you leave them in your depth chart, they will not take the field.  All other statuses are able to play.

Injuries are calculated in the game engine on nearly every event that could cause an injury. Each event will have a base level chance for injury, and there are few factors that will increase the probability that a player will be injured.  The factors that increase the injury probability are:

• Conditioning: The lower the conditioning bar, the more likely a player will be injured.  This is kind of a catch-22, because in order to get the conditioning bar high, your player must play in the games.  During the pre-season, you will want to play your starters enough to get their conditioning bar up without too much of an injury risk.  The option of when to pull your starters in pre-season is in the miscellaneous game plan options.
• Age: As players age, they are going to be more likely to be injured.  So don't be surprised when your older veterans tend to have more injuries than the younger players.
• Current Injury Status: If a player is already nursing an injury, he has a higher likelihood of incurring another injury.  A player with a Probable injury status is far less likely to suffer an additional injury than a player with Doubtful injury status.
• Fatigue: The more fatigued a player is, the more likely he is going to suffer an injury. This plays hand-in-hand with the conditioning attribute, because a player with low conditioning will fatigue faster and recover more slowly.  You can define how fatigued you will allow your players to become and still remain on the field in your miscellaneous game plan options.

Once an injury occurs, the player will have to leave the field for at least one play.  If his injury is serious enough, he will not return to the game.

To find out more about a player's injury, open his player card by clicking on his name and then choose the "Health" tab.  You will see the condition of the areas of his body, where 100 is fully healthy.

These values will affect appropriate attributes while this player is on the field.  Leg injuries, for example, will cause the player to run more slowly, while hand injuries will make it harder for the player to catch or otherwise hold on to the ball.

In this example, you see that Roger Wood is marked as having a neck injury with a 4-week recovery time.  Looking at his health bars, you see that he actually also has a leg injury.  The injury status display shows the worst injury that the player has.  Notice that his leg health is 69 but his neck health is only 48.  The 4-week timeline is the expected time for this player to return to 100% - that means all his health bars should get to 100 in about 4 weeks if he doesn't suffer any more injuries.  I will also point out that the factor used to determine the injury probability during the game is not cumulative; in this example, Roger Wood's leg injury has no effect on his probability for incurring an additional injury, only his neck injury is used in the calculation.  (Unless his leg gets further injured during the game and it drops below 48, making it the more severe of the two)

You can play a player as long as his injury status is not "Out."  The status is designed to be a bit of a guide to help you decide whether to deactivate the player and let him recover, or go ahead and play him.  If a player is "Probable," his injury status is probably not going to significantly decrease his skills or have a large impact on his re-injury probability.  Unless you really don't need the player in the lineup, you will probably be ok playing a player with probable status.  Questionable is a little bit more severe, and you should exercise caution when activating a player with questionable injury status.  The very term "questionable" implies that you need to evaluate the risk of playing him.  "Doubtful" players probably shouldn't be played - unless you decide that playing him is worth the risk of additional injury.

On the depth chart page, each player's injury status is represented by a small triangle in the upper right corner.  The scale goes from green to red, with green indicating that the player is probable, to red indicating that the player is out.  You can quickly look over your team's depth chart and deactivate players that you feel are too injured to play without having to remove them from your depth chart.  If you want to see more details about the player's injury, click on the (i) button to open the player's card.

If a player's status is "Out," that means that his injury is serious.  If you have a player with an "out" injury status and his recovery timeline looks like it will be most or all of the season, you can place the player on injured reserve.  Next to his injury status on the player card is a button to do this.  Once you place a player on injured reserve, he cannot be activated for the remainder of the season.  His roster spot will open up, and you can sign an additional player to fill that roster spot.  His salary, however, will continue to count against your salary cap.  You will only want to place a player on injured reserve as a last resort; most players will return to Questionable and Probable status well before the indicated time line for returning to 100%.