Podcast
Transcript
Hi everyone, welcome back to sports talk podcast. Today, we’re diving into the fascinating world of NFL injuries, based on our in-depth analysis of the 2015 season.
Let’s explore some surprising insights into how often players get injured and what factors might influence these rates.
First off, we tracked 1,794 NFL players throughout the season. Out of these, 688 players—about 38%—missed at least one game due to injury. 45% of players were healthy and available for all 16 games, and then 17% did not get injured but were not on a roster for every game.
Interestingly, running backs were found to be at the highest risk of injury. They have a 5.2% chance of getting injured each game, with an average injury length of 3.9 games missed.
In contrast, fullbacks had a surprisingly low injury rate, although this could be due to their limited sample size. There were only 6 reported injuries that resulted in them missing a game, however they are used much less than other positions so the sample size is too small to draw conclusions.
Quarterbacks and offensive linemen were among the least likely to get injured on a per-game basis. Quarterbacks had a 2.8% chance and offensive linemen had a 3.4% chance of getting injured each game. Yet, when looking at injuries per snap, these positions showed a strong correlation with injury rates similar to other positions. This could be due to their limited participation in special teams.
Now, you might think that the more a player is on the field, the higher their chance of getting injured. However, the analysis revealed that the percentage of snaps played doesn’t significantly predict injury likelihood. This finding suggests that factors like special teams play and practice injuries might contribute more to injury rates than actual game time.
Lastly, we discovered that the average injury causes a player to miss 3.1 games and the average chance of getting hurt per game was 4.1%.
That’s it for today’s episode! Stay tuned for more insights from the NFL as we continue to analyze the intricacies of professional football. Thanks for listening!
Story
I found a data set on NFL players injuries, which analyzed which positions were most likely to get hurt, and if minutes played directly reports to injuries. The data showed that running backs are most likely to get hurt, and quarterbacks and offensive linemen are least likely. It also showed that starters were not more likely to get hurt than backups.
Media
I chose to do a podcast because I was able to explain what the data showed and reasons for why that might be the case. It was not data that necessarily needed to be seen, so I could explain everything through a podcast and was able to add sound effects that related to football for better imagery.
Process
I recorded my podcast on Voice Memos on my iPhone, then uploaded the recording onto SoundTrap to edit.
Credits
The sound effects I used in the podcast were downloaded from Pixabay. I used Perplexity AI to assist in writing a script after I decided what datapoints I wanted to focus on.
