Who actually gets hurt, and what costs you

What counts as an injury

A missed week is classified in this order. Roster status of suspended, exempt, COVID list, opt-out or retired counts as that, never as injury. Any other reserve-list status (injured reserve, physically unable to perform, non-football injury) counts as injury. Otherwise, an injury report listing of Out, Doubtful or Questionable, or an inactive listing with the injured designation, counts as injury, unless the listed reason is illness or "not injury related." Illness is kept in its own bucket. A missed week directly after an injury week with no new information is treated as the same injury. Anything left is "other." Across all 1,509 player-seasons the missed weeks split 3,807 injury, 24 illness, 79 suspension, 74 COVID list, 10 retired and 591 other, and everything except injury is shown as "other" in the player table. A player who was released and not signed elsewhere drops out of games possible for those weeks rather than counting as missed.

How missed games are counted

Games possible: the regular-season games the player's team played that year, using whichever team the weekly roster listed him on, so trades count correctly. Games played: weeks where he recorded any stat in the nflverse weekly player stats.

Bye weeks and short seasons

Games possible already excludes each team's bye week, so a bye is never counted as missed. The 2020 season had COVID list absences. They are never counted as injury, they sit in "other," and the games still count as possible.

Who is in the sample

Every player inside the top 150 of the last FantasyPros consensus PPR ADP published before week 1, 2015 through 2025, positions QB, RB, WR and TE. Kickers and defenses are dropped, which is why the count is 1,509 player-seasons rather than 1,650. Every one of those players matched a roster record; none were dropped for a name mismatch. Two caveats. The 2017 snapshot is standard-scoring ADP because no PPR snapshot from that window survived on the Internet Archive. And because the snapshot is the last one before week 1, players hurt in the preseason had already fallen out of the top 150 and are not in the sample: Jordy Nelson in 2015, Julian Edelman in 2017, Jerick McKinnon in 2018, J.K. Dobbins in 2021. Everything here is risk from week 1 on.

Where the data comes from

Sources: nflverse injuries, weekly rosters, player stats, play-by-play, and FantasyPros ADP snapshots on the Internet Archive, because FantasyPros does not publish historical ADP.

Known gaps

Body part comes from the injury report filed for that week. If there is none (players on injured reserve usually drop off the weekly report), the pipeline uses the most recent report from the previous four weeks or any report filed during the same absence. Reports filed after the absence ended are not used. That rule was added after the first version of this piece mislabeled two well-known cases.

73 long absences, many of them early-season injured-reserve placements that never appeared on a weekly report, had no body part in the data at all. Those were filled from the public injury record by hand and marked in the pipeline code as overrides. The 2015 weekly roster file also drops a player entirely once he goes on injured reserve, and injured-reserve players are not on the weekly report, so 14 well-known 2015 absences (Jamaal Charles, Le'Veon Bell, Arian Foster, Keenan Allen, Tony Romo and others) and two 2016 knees had fallen into "other." Each was checked against the transaction record and set by hand. The older roster files also use retired team codes, which are mapped to the current ones before anything is joined. One absence, Calvin Ridley's 2021 leave, was moved out of the injury count by hand because the roster data files it as a reserve list.

No alignment data exists publicly, so slot versus outside is not tested. The injury report is what teams choose to file, and some file thinly. Weeks 16 to 18 mix real injuries with end-of-season shutdowns. These are rates, not causes.