AsylumGuido

Nice find, Oak. This research shows no correlation at all between age and time missed due to injury.

BakoSaint

I think this study does not reach medical standards and has a serious flaw because it does not randomly sample players at different ages. Instead it only counts players that teams felt comfortable enough to sign who made active rosters. Clearly if you randomly called players from the 2020 draft and players from the 2010 draft and determined if they were healthy enough to play, players from the 2020 draft would have less chronic injury issues and be healthier, while many from the 2010 draft would be retired by choice or by default as their injuiries piled up and teams lost intered. Anyone who has been 25, 30, 35, and 40 knows you slow down and heal slower and have more aches and pains the older you get. Its common sense. But NFL teams don't have to retain every draftee until 40, they can selectively filter the populations and give a second chance to an injured 25 year old due to upside while cutting loose a 35 year old at the first sign of breakdown. So, in general, perhaps 25 and 35 year olds on active NFL rosters don't get injured different amounts, but that is only because NFL teams are not just keep any injured player until age 35, they are scrutinizing past injust history and doing detailed physicals much more carefully for the 35 year old. And then you get some draftees who can't stay healthy straight out of college, the Analzones and Bests of the league, that bring up the injury average for all young players, and those players typically are out of the league by 30 or 35 if not earlier. So thats how injury rates stay constant when obviously a given person is more easily injured at an older age, teams keep weeding it down to the most durable players with age.

Where this breaks down for a team like the Saints is our salary cap situation, need to restructure to balance the cap, and tendency to trade away half our draft picks. We are in a situation of 'beggars can't be choosers.' We know Andrus Peat is brittle. Most teams would cut him. But the way we manage the cap we can't afford the cap hit to cut him. And we can't afford good free agents and don't have many draft picks so we restock our roster by bringing back guys like Mark Ingram. Many teams draft a mobile backup QB in the middle rounds who was young and uninjured, we were short of middle round picks so we picked up Taysom Hill who is older and fairly injury prone, likely reasons he was not drafted and Green Bay decided to let him go. Heck we were the last resort for Kevin White. Does that guy have any injury history? I seem to remember something. What about Teddy Bridgewater, Delvin Breaux? We will take any risk, while when other teams sign an older players its often because its Tom Brady and he had 1 injury in 20 years. When desperation enters into roster management and results in an older team, you do get more injuries, because you are not getting the players who stayed in the league at an older age because their durability justified it, you get the players who stayed in the league at an older age because they got a phone call they never expected and then when the next injury happened and they expected to be cut, they were instead restructured and given an extension.

Update: Case and point today, we just added RB David Johnson, who is completely washed and injury riddled. A move like this is only made out of desperation, and regardless of whether all RB his age are more likely to be injured, clearly he is given the history.

AsylumGuido