How injured is your NFL team?

The Game Room
1

As a Giants fan, it always feels like the Giants get injured an inordinate amount, stretching back to before the Eli/Coughlin era. Every teams gets lots of injuries, but my biased opinion indicates that the Giants are particularly bitten.

Turns out, at least for the last couple years, I’m not just being biased. FootballOutsiders put together a metric for analyzing injuries and their impact, and the Giants are quite impressive in their domination of that metric:

In the last two years, here are the 10 worst AGL scores:

141.3 Giants (2013)
137.1 Giants (2014)
119.1 Chargers (2014)
104.7 Colts (2014)
103.6 Raiders (2014)
103.0 Packers (2013)
101.8 49ers (2014)
101.6 Bears (2014)
100.7 Colts (2013)
98.8 Chiefs (2014)

That’s just brutal. The unlucky teams rate around 100, but the Giants shattered that two years in a row. As someone pointed out in the comments, in 2013 the second most injured team (Packers) was closer to the league average than they were the Giants.

EDIT: Here’s a link to an article discussing specifically just how bad the Giants are based on the FO article.

2

Nice find.
Good news for Cowboys, Redskins and Eagles if it continues

3

That confirms what it felt like watching the Chargers this year, as they set the record for this stat on the offensive side of the ball. Injuries at the center position alone would put them past most other teams’ offenses, I think.

4

So do you think the Giants are just unlucky, or is it something systemic, like a bad training staff or the players’ work ethic?

5

It might be cyclical with average roster age. A lot of those teams seemed to have aging defenses.

6

Mike McCarthy completely revamped the Packers practice regimen and schedule for the 2014 as an attempt to address the injury issues noted in 2013 (sixth worst in your list). Story about it here. Unfortunately those changes stopped being effective with about 3 minutes left in the playoff game at Seattle. :wink: (Or when Rodgers pulled his hammy at the end of the regular season, take your pick).

We’ll see if the Packers can continue the good injury “luck” going forward or if they’ regress to the mean in the coming years…

7

My suspicion is that it’s related to very old-school philosophies of training and practice.

I’m a huge Tom Coughlin fan, but cutting edge he is not.