Would an 18-Game Schedule Result in More Injuries?

Overwhelming concern about player health and injuries is the stated cause celebre, though I am not sure that is what people are truly concerned about (or they would be championing other injury-related causes like concussion diagnosis, monitoring and prevention far more vigorously). I think they are just comfortable with their 16-game schedule, and much like my little daughter is comfortable with her well-worn baby llama, writers like Peter King will cling to 16 games like a tired toddler, using any completely unrelated event to throw a tantrum.

Don’t get me wrong, injuries and welfare of the players are important issues, but when it comes to the 18-game schedule, it’s a matter of small changes in gray shade, and not a massive shift. It’s a question of health of starters in a couple of quarters of preseason action, versus the health of starters in two games of action.  I haven’t done a comprehensive study on what the impact of two additional games would have on injuries (though the NFL does have the money to commission such a study by someone smarter than me). I did look at weekly injury rates at the running back position, by seeing how many backs who had played every game through a certain week then missed the following week.

Short version: there is about a 4.7% chance that a back who has missed no games up to that point will miss the next game.  That would be about three backs (out of the 64 backs at the top two of each team’s depth chart) per week. Keep in mind those aren’t Ryan Grant type injuries – which are far, far more rare – but just any injury which causes a missed game.  I have also looked at injuries the next season depending on how playoff games a back’s team played in. Other than limited cases where a running back had a really high workload at the end of the regular season and played deep into the playoffs (like Terrell Davis, Jamal Anderson and Jamal Lewis), the injury rates don’t seem to be much higher for backs that played two or more additional games in the playoffs.  The incidence of season ending injuries in the first six weeks of the following season was 7.7% for all backs who played zero playoff games, and 7.0% for all backs who played in the playoffs.

I also like the 16-game schedule: it is comfortable, easy to apply to the current league size (four games against two other divisions, two more against teams in your conference that finished in same place as you). So, I’m not banging the drum that we must change the schedule length either. I also find the complaints about the preseason prices being excessive equally non-persuasive. Hey, I don’t like the fact that when I buy a pack of Starburst, I get a bunch of lemons in there, but I do it because I think the overall value of the pack is still worth it because of the strawberries and oranges. [Ed. I hate lemon too! I knew he was a good fit for this site!] If I didn’t, I wouldn’t buy the pack of Starburst. I don’t get hung up in thinking I overpaid specifically for the lemons because of what the average unit price says.

I do not presume to have a stone tablet that tells me exactly how many games is the exact right amount of games for a football season.  If we were trying to be truly fair about the outcome of determining the best team, the right number would be 62 (home and road against every other league member), but that is not feasible.  If we were trying to limit injuries, the answer would be zero.  The right answer is somewhere between those extremes.  I do know this, the NFL has throughout its 90 years of existence been a league of change. If you want to stubbornly cling to history, watch baseball. You want to take a guess at the longest period of stability the league has had, where it has had the exact same teams, playing in the exact same cities, with the exact same schedule format and playoff structure?

Nine.  That’s right, and it’s from 2002 to this season.  I guess by that measure, it’s no surprise that the owners are itching for another change, and just like all the others, like moving teams for better stadiums and adding playoff games and adding league games to compete with the AAFC and AFL, it’s motivated by that most American of concepts: more money. [Winslow photo via Getty]