This NFL season seems to have been wrought with injuries.
Each week seems to bring about another star NFL running back, wide receiver, or quarterback's season ending injury.
But have there
actually been more injuries reported than in previous seasons?
One logical place to begin answering this question is by looking at the weekly injury reports.
Each week, teams report when players miss pratice, or are expected to miss games, as well as the type of injury that players are dealing with.
The following data is a summation of all injury reports by teams up until week
of the respective seasons, with non-injuries removed from the list.
We also filter out any reported injury which did not result in a status of
Questionable,
Doubtful, or
Out.
As we can see, there have actually been
less injuries reported up until this point by teams.
This seems to be disprove the idea that there have been more injuries during the 2020 season than in preivous season...
BUT...
The only players listed on the weekly injury reports are those who are on a team's
Active Roster...
Meaning any player who is placed on the
Injured Reserve list are
not included in this report.
In order to truly answer our question, we need to inspect the number of players placed on the IR list during the 2020 season.
Based on this data, we see that there have been
significantly more players placed on IR this season than in the prior four seasons.
The average number of players placed on IR at this point in this season is
, with a standard deviation of
.
In order to determine if there are actually more injuries this season than in prior seasons, we can combine the number of injuries reported with the number of players placed on IR...
When viewed, we can see that the combined numbers are in line with the last few seasons.
Conclusion
When viewed in aggregate, the number of overall injuries in 2020 are on par with the last 4 years,
up to this point in the year.
However, the number of players players placed on the IR list is up by
over the average up to this point.
This might mean that players are being more seriously injured during the season,
or it could be due to the new
2020 IR rules, which allow teams to re-activate players more quickly and without limit.
2020 NFL Injuries