As a long-suffering New York Giants fan, I'm accustomed to hopes being dashed and elation turning to despair. But this week's injury report, after a particularly miserable Monday night loss, made me wonder whether serious injuries are on the rise in the NFL, or only on my favorite team.
How many players an average team had out of action in a given regular-season week: players listed Out on the weekly injury report, plus players on a reserve list (injured reserve and physically unable to perform). The bars are the average across all 32 teams and do not change with your pick; the line is your team on the same scale. Per week rather than per season, because the season grew from 17 weeks to 18 in 2021.
Hover a season for the numbers · gold ticks are rule changes and events, click for the note
The share of Out listings by body part, league-wide, one column per season. The report names the injury only for players on the active roster, so this is the weekly report alone, not the reserve list.
Every team in one season: how many players missed at least a game, against how many player-weeks were lost in total. Up and to the right is the corner nobody wants. The dashed lines are the league medians.
Hover a team · click to make it your team
The same teams and seasons, with player-weeks lost against regular-season winning percentage. Injuries and losing feed each other in both directions, so the line is a correlation, not a verdict: teams that are losing also shut players down, and teams with thin rosters do both.
Hover a team · click to make it your team
The counts are built from two public files kept by the nflverse project (CC BY 4.0): the league's weekly injury reports since 2009 and the weekly rosters. A player-week is lost when a player is listed Out on the report for that week's game, or when he is on a reserve list that week (injured reserve, physically unable to perform, non-football injury); a player on both is counted once. Listings that are not injuries, such as illness or personal matters, are left out, and so is the COVID reserve list where the roster data marks it (2021 on; 2020 cannot be separated). Only the regular season is counted.
Two things to hold in mind. The weekly report only names players on the active roster, and its rules changed in 2016, when "Probable" was dropped and reporting was tightened. The reserve-list series is thin before 2016 in the roster data, so those years are shown faded and the long-run comparison should be read from the Out series. Rule changes that move injuries between the two lists are marked in gold.
The league's own injury numbers, compiled by IQVIA and published each February, cover concussions, ACL tears, lower-body strains and games missed from 2015; they are here, and they are not machine-readable, so they are cited in the notes rather than plotted. This page refreshes from the nflverse files on a schedule; in season that means every week.