Everything You Ever Wanted to Know about the Redskins & Injured Reserve

Posted on November 26, 2018 by Steve Thomas

November 26, 2018

by Steve Thomas

The common fan perception is that the Redskins suffer an inordinate amount of injuries compared to other teams. Certainly there’s no denying that this season and last this team has been besieged by a rash of key players on both sides of the ball going down for the year. The big question on my mind is whether this impression is simply due to bias resulting from paying more attention to Washington or whether there’s some basis in reality, so I decided to find out. The focus of this column will be injured reserve. Consider this part 1; if I get enough of a response, and I feel like delving even more into this, there will be a part 2 that gets into the number of gamedays lost. If not, well, at least you’ll have this much. Please give me some feedback and let me know what you think.

The process

I’m warning you right now that this column is going to get far more into statistics than I originally intended – and for that I apologize – so if you want the Reader’s Digest version, skip down to the chart at the bottom of the page.

For this study, I manually counted the number of players on injured reserve on each team at the end of each season between 2009 and 2017. All data is courtesy of Pro Football Reference. I have a spreadsheet (that’s way too big to publish; sorry) that lists all of the data for each team during each season, including the total number of players on injured reserve and on the Physically Unable to Perform list for the entire season during each of those years and the annual average per team. I also took the same data for each year’s AFC and NFC champions and each Super Bowl Champion, along with the averages for each. Finally, I also included each team’s combined winning percentage during those same years. The stopping point of 2009 is arbitrary as that is as far back as the Pro Football Reference data goes. I did not take into account players that had come off the list and returned to the active roster at some point during the year. Also (because I’m better than PFF), I’m going to assign a statistical variance of .04 to each team’s overall average because the data on Pro Football Reference contained a small number of irregularities that caused me to question the status of a handful of players, so please take that into account.

One weakness of this study is that it doesn’t take into account the specific players who were placed on injured reserve. There’s a difference between losing the starting quarterback (i.e., 2017 Eagles and 2018 Redskins) and the backup safety, but accounting for that is beyond the scope of this column.

Make sense? Okay, good. Let’s get on with it.

The data

Basic injured reserve numbers

The number of Redskins on injured reserve from 2009 through 2017 was as follows:

2009: 12 2010: 12 2011: 8 2012: 13 2013: 11 2014: 13

2015: 13 2016: 13 2017: 24

The Redskins’ average number of players on injured reserve between 2009 and 2017 was 13.22, which is 27th in the NFL. 2017 was clearly an outlier in terms of the Redskins historical average over this time period. The overall league annual average was 11.02, and the median was 10.78. The five teams who, on average, had the least number of players on injured reserve are as follows:

1) Minnesota Vikings: 6.89

2) Atlanta Falcons: 7.33

3) Philadelphia Eagles: 7.89

5) Pittsburgh Steelers: 8.00

5) Oakland Raiders: 8.00

The six teams who, on average, had the most number of players on injured reserve are as follows:

27) Washington Redskins: 13.22

28) Carolina Panthers: 13.67

29) New Orleans Saints: 14.44

30) Indianapolis Colts: 14.78

31) New York Giants: 14.89

32) Jacksonville Jaguars: 15.44

The single worst seasons for any team as measured by number of players on injured reserve from 2009 through 2017 were the 2017 New Orleans Saints, who had 30 that year, followed by the 2017 New York Giants with 28, the 2017 Indianapolis Colts with 26, the 2016 Los Angeles Chargers with 25, and the 2017 Redskins with 24.

For those of you who are statistically-oriented, the standard deviation (which is a measure of the average amount of variance of from the overall average for each team) in this data was 2.35, which is fairly large and is the result of the wide disparity of the data between the 32 teams. The Redskins’ average number of players on injured reserve is a hair under a full standard deviation above the average (which isn’t awful but also isn’t good).

For those wondering, the New England Patriots were tied for 20th with 11.44. The Dallas Cowboys were 6th with 8.67.

Only two teams have had 3 or more seasons with 18 or more players on IR, the Baltimore Ravens and the Jacksonville Jaguars (each with 3). Conversely, 14 teams have had no seasons with 18 or more. The Redskins have only had 1 season in that category, 2017.

Four teams have had 3 or more seasons with 5 or fewer players on injured reserve, the New York Jets, Steelers, Falcons, and Raiders. 14 teams, including the Redskins, did not have a single season falling into this category.

Overall, there were 521 players on injured reserve across the NFL in 2017, which was by far the worst year that I researched. 2016 was the second-worst, with 434.

Surprisingly, the NFC and Super Bowl champions were not noticeably better than average in terms of the raw injured reserve numbers. The Super Bowl champions from 2009 through 2017 were as a whole slightly better than average at 10.89, which would have been ranked 17th on the list had this been just one team. The NFC champions from 2009 through 2017 averaged 11.33 players on injured reserve, which was actually worse than the league average and would have been tied with the Seattle Seahawks at 18th. The average for the AFC champions was in fact noticeably lower than the NFL average at 9.78, but that would’ve still just been ranked in the middle of the pack at 15.

Winning percentage comparison

During that same time period, 2009 through 2017, the Redskins winning percentage was .389, which was ranked 28th. The top seven teams by order of winning percentage were:

1) New England Patriots: .757

2) Pittsburgh Steelers: .652

3) Green Bay Packers: .652

4) New Orleans Saints: .604

7) Atlanta Falcons: .583

7) Denver Broncos: .583

7) Seattle Seahawks: .583

The bottom five teams by order of winning percentage were as follows:

28) Washington Redskins: .389

29) Los Angeles Rams: .361

30) Tampa Bay Buccaneers: .347

31) Jacksonville Jaguars: .326

32) Cleveland Browns: .236

Is there a correlation between injured reserve and winning?

This is the million dollar question, and the heart of what I wanted to figure out in this study: is there a correlation between the number of players on injured reserve for each team and winning? To figure this out in a way that wouldn’t make me explain the intricacies of statistical correlation, I added the rankings for each team’s average winning percentage and average number of players on injured reserve per year together to get a master winning percentage / injured reserve ranking (for example, the Steelers were 5th in injuries and 3rd in winning percentage, so they got an 8; the Redskins were 27th in injuries and 28th in winning percentage, so they got a 55). This most definitely isn’t perfect, but what this does is identify the teams that have been the real outliers in terms of winning and injured reserve. The lower the number, the better the franchise has been in terms of winning percentage and number of players on injured reserve.

The top five franchises by this metric are:

1) Pittsburgh Steelers: 8

2) Atlanta Falcons: 9

3) Philadelphia Eagles: 12

4) Minnesota Vikings: 16

5) Denver Broncos: 16

What these numbers mean is that these teams have a very high ranking in average winning percentage and a small average number of players on injured reserve between 2009 and 2017.

The bottom five franchises by this metric are:

28) Cleveland Browns: 49

29) New York Giants: 51

30) Tampa Bay Buccaneers: 54

31) Washington Redskins: 55

32) Jacksonville Jaguars: 63

The teams in the bottom five have had a low winning percentage and a high number of players on injured reserve. The average for all NFL teams is 33.38, and the standard deviation is 14.05. The large standard deviation is reflective of the wide disparity in the data amongst the teams. The Redskins value of 55 is more than 1 standard deviation above the mean, which is bad.

If you’ve gotten through all of this, I thank you for sticking this one out, and I apologize for delving into statistics for something that started out as a simple calculation of the number of players on injured reserve. In order to make this more visually appealing, below is a scatter chart showing each team’s average winning percentage on the Y axis (the vertical axis) and the average number on injured reserve for each team on the X axis (the horizontal axis):

In general, teams in the upper left quadrant have both won alot of games and have had fewer players on injured reserve. This is the ideal quadrant to be in. There are 7 teams in this quadrant. The lower right quadrant, where the Redskins reside, are the teams that have low winning percentages and high numbers on IR. There are 8 teams in this quadrant. The upper right quadrant is for teams that have suffered a high number of players on injured reserve but have a high winning percentage. There are 8 teams in this quadrant, including the most successful team over this time period, the Patriots. The lower left quadrant is the quadrant with no excuses – lower number of players on IR and a low winning percentage. There are 7 teams in this quadrant.

Conclusion

First, as we’ve established, the Redskins have indeed been subjected to a higher number players being put on injured reserve than most other teams. They aren’t the worst, but they are bottom six, with the Jacksonville Jaguars being the worst by a wide margin (nearly two standard deviations above the mean). The Minnesota Vikings have been the best, approaching two standard deviations below the mean.

Second, there isn’t a strong correlation between winning percentage or winning championships and the length of a team’s injured reserve list. I actually did calculate the statistical correlation between these two sets of data, but in order to spare you that brain damage, the best way to see this is to look at the chart – the 32 teams are just about evenly distributed between the four quadrants. The fact that the average for the Super Bowl champions over this time period was within .13 of the NFL average, and that the NFC champions averaged a bit higher than NFL average, was surprising to me. Logic would seem to indicate that the healthier teams would win more, but these numbers generally show that this doesn’t have to be the case as it applies to injured reserve. Championship teams generally don’t have outrageously long IR lists, but they do have lists of approximately average length compared to all other teams.

Part two of this study will involve the number of games lost per team, but you’re going to have to let me know either in the comment section, on Twitter, or via email, that you want to see it before I tackle that project. Either way, let me know what you think.