Bob Sanders: We Hardly Knew Ye

There’s death. There are taxes. And somewhere in between, there’s Bob Sanders ending up on the injury list during a NFL season.
 
For the third season in a row, Sanders has been placed on the injured reserve list, ending his season after playing in just two games. In 2009 it was his arm, last year it was a torn biceps on opening day, and now it’s a knee injury in his first (and likely last) season with San Diego.
 
Three straight IR’s are not the record, but something that is record-breaking is just how many times we’ve seen Bob Sanders fail to stay on the field due to injury.
 
Sanders has played in 50 regular season games. Counting this season, he will have missed 78 regular season games. That’s being available only 39.1% of the time. Furthermore, Sanders has had six different seasons where he failed to play in more than six games.
 
Using the “Player Season Finder” at pro-football-reference.com and using 1950 as the cutoff point, results show there has not been another starter that has had as many seasons as Sanders (6) where he failed to play in more than six games.
 
Everyone ahead of him was a backup quarterback, or a starter-turned-backup, and those are the kind of players that have long careers, but rarely get in games. We are talking about players such as Mark Herrmann, Todd Collins, Bill Munson, Steve Bono, Vince Evans, Jon Kitna, Jamie Martin, Alex Van Pelt, etc.
 
Randall Cunningham had seven such seasons, but he was an injured starter in only two of those seasons (1991 and 1993 with the Eagles). He was benched in 1999 for the Vikings.
 
We have seen great players injured to the extent it cut their careers short (Gale Sayers, Tony Boselli, Sterling Sharpe, Terrell Davis). We have seen players that may have been great if they weren’t injured so severely so fast (Greg Cook, Robert Edwards, Bo Jackson, Ki-Jana Carter).
 
We’ve never seen a player like Sanders, who falls somewhere between the two groups. He was never demoted from the starting lineup. He’s had a few chances to shine, staying healthy enough for the Colts in the 2005 and 2007 seasons. Fittingly enough, those were the two best scoring defenses the Colts had in the Peyton Manning era. In between, Sanders returned for the Colts in the 2006 playoffs and helped improve the defense on their way to victory in Super Bowl XLI. He won Defensive Player of the Year honors in 2007.
 
Since then, Sanders has played in a total of just 11 games.
 
For that small window of time, Sanders was considered an elite safety in the league. After Dwight Freeney, he was the most important piece to the Indianapolis Colts defense, often cleaning up a lot of the front seven’s mistakes with his hard-hitting tackling ability.
 
The problem is Sanders either hits too hard, or he’s the only player in the league with an undiagnosed case of osteogenesis imperfecta, which could explain why “Mr. Glass” is such a suitable nickname (for the Unbreakable fans).
 
Tony Dungy called him “The Eraser”, because of how he erased so many mistakes on the defense. You could characterize the whole Colts’ defense as a cheap, old pencil: sharp on the edge, chewed up in the middle, and an eraser that breaks off too many times and needs replaced.
 
Speaking of replacements, Colts safety Melvin Bullitt is keeping up the Sanders tradition. After missing 12 games last season, Bullitt was also placed on injured reserve the same day as Sanders after just playing two games in 2011.
 
Unless Matthew Stafford fails to make it through 2011 injury-free, Bob Sanders will be the poster boy for a player that never got to fulfill expectations because he was always injured. The position he plays may be called “safety”, but football has been anything but safe to Sanders’ health, and it’s unfortunate to see a talented player struggle at a historical rate to get on the field and do what he loves to do.

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Read more: Bob Sanders, Indianapolis Colts, Matthew Stafford, Melvin Bullitt, NFL, Peyton Manning, Randall Cunningham, San Diego Chargers, Tony Dungy