Instead of gradually working their way up to full intensity like in a normal season, they would jump right in for Week 1 without letting their bodies adapt. Given the lack of organized team activities (OTAs) or minicamps before the season and no preseason games, it was thought that players could not prepare themselves properly. Many analysts projected that injuries might spike in 2020 as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. And yet 2020 eclipsed the 2015 high-water mark for injuries, with more than 800 injuries recorded. Other lower-body injuries, such as torn MCLs, rose more than 20% that year as well, with Peyton Manning, Dez Bryant and Le’Veon Bell among those who missed time. Numerous stars, such as Jamaal Charles, Jordy Nelson and Joe Flacco, lost much of their seasons to torn ACLs. Still, the rise in concussion awareness does not tell the whole story for 2015. In the end, reported concussions rose more than 30% compared to 2014, pushing the number of reported injuries higher than ever before.

This new emphasis on tracking concussions also led to more players self-reporting head injuries to team doctors, further increasing the count. That year, the NFL introduced impartial concussion spotters, who could stop play if they believed a player had suffered a head injury.

Prior to 2020, the most in-game injuries in a season had occurred in 2015, when 786 play stoppages were reported for injuries. In fact, given that at least 45,000 plays are run each season, there have been more than 100 additional injuries this year than would be expected at the previous injury rate. This may not seem like a major difference, but taken across an entire season, the extra injuries accumulate quickly. Using nflfastR play-by-play data for every game since 2010 and filtering to only include plays which featured the word “injured,” I ran a t-test (a method for determining whether a significant difference exists between averages) to see whether the injury rate was significantly higher in 2020 compared to the decade before (see below).Ĭlearly, there was a significant increase in the injury rate, which climbed from just under 1.5 injuries per 100 plays to 1.73 injuries per 100 plays.

Nfl games 2020