Mile High Report
This will have a lot of data, so if you don’t want to look at and think about numbers, just skip to the conclusions at the end.
For those who are unaware, the only positions that play ever offensive snap (by design) are the OL and the QB. So in an ideal situation, all five starting offensive lineman and the QB play 100% of the offensive snaps. On good (or really bad) and healthy teams, this can sometimes be less than 100% if the starters are removed late in a blowout games to give the backups some game experience.
The offensive line is also unique in that familiarity with the guys playing with you on the line is critical to performance. That being said, it is rare for a team to have the same primary starters at all five spots on the OL for two consecutive seasons (more on this later).
Over the last 11 seasons (2015-2025) roughly 316 NFL offensive lineman have played a snap in a regular season game. The fewest was 292 in 2019 and the most was 348 in 2021. I was able to scrape the offensive snap number for every lineman every season in this study and then I was able to convert that to a % of total offensive team snaps for that season. This data is from SISdatahub.com. There were 19 offensive linemen in 2025 that played every snap on offense for their team. Because of injuries and blowouts, Mike McGlinchey had the highest percentage for the Bronco OL at 1067. The team ran 1092 offensive plays which was the 5th most in the NFL in 2025. So MM played 97.7% of the possible snaps for us in 2025.
There were 68 OL guys who played 90% or more of their team snaps in 2025. This was one of the lowest total values during the time. The lowest, 66, was in 2023. So I decided to figure out a way to use the numbers to compare OL health across the league. I came up with a formula that uses the number of guys who played >90% (times 3.5), plus the number of guys who played >80%, minus the number of guys with >20%, and minus the guys who played >0% (divided by 2.5). In this way the >80% and the >20% cancel out each other making the value very heavily weighted by the >90% number. The formula was designed to get zero for an average season, positive for a “healthy” season, and negative for an “injured” season.
If you use this for the eleven seasons you see that in four of five years 2015-2019, the league had fairly healthy OLs with the exception of 2017. The average was 31.6. The average for the last six seasons was -6.8 and the trend is downward. This could be a result of teams using a sixth offensive lineman more, but I doubt it since that have been fairly stable.
Now this does not look at players...
