Blogging The Boys
The Cowboys should be a healthier team in 2025.
Football is a game of attrition, and every team must deal with injuries over the course of a season. But you need some extra bad mojo to get hit the way the Cowboys got hit with injuries last year.
Every year, Football Outsiders used to publish their statistical study of team health from the previous NFL season, and Aaron Schatz has carried on that tradition at his new site, FTNFantasy.com. For 2024, Schatz determined that the Cowboys were one of the teams hit harder by the injury bug, especially on defense, at least according to their metric called Adjusted Games Lost (AGL). In their own words:
Adjusted games lost doesn’t just add up total injuries. It accounts for both absent players and those playing at less than 100%, and it specifically measures injuries to expected starters and important situational players rather than little-used backups. As such, AGL estimates the impact of injuries on teams and provides a comparable total that often succinctly explains why teams improved or declined from one year to the next.
By this definition, the Cowboys finished the 2024 season with 84.7 Adjusted Games Lost. Ranking teams from the healthiest (#1 Baltimore with 16.3 AGL) to the most injured (#32 San Francisco, 141.2 AGL), the Cowboys ranked 19th overall. Just a year before, the Cowboys were quite a bit healthier, ranking 10th overall with an AGL of 51.8. The following table shows where the Cowboys have ranked over the years in terms of AGL.
On balance, the Cowboys have enjoyed slightly above average injury luck over the last 16 years: in five of the last 16 seasons (marked in green) they were among the least-injured teams in the league, eight years (no color) saw them slightly above or slightly below a league-average AGL, and two seasons (red) saw them at the bottom of the league in terms of AGL.
But 2024 proved to be a double whammy for the Cowboys. Not only did they have a high AGL rate, those AGL proved to be highly concentrated.
The table below highlights the highly asymmetric injury distribution on defense in 2024:
The Cowboys were hit hard by injuries at corner and defensive end. In 2024, the defense was ranked 24th in the league with 52.9 Adjusted Games Lost. The offense on the other hand, despite the high-profile injury to Dak Prescott, ranked a league average 15th with 31.8 Adjusted Games Lost.
Statistically speaking, there are two main reasons for optimism in the numbers presented above, “regression to the mean” and “normal distribution”.
Regression to the mean
This statistical phenomenon describes the fact that if a variable is extreme on its first measurement, it will tend to be closer to the average on a second measurement. In our case today, it means that teams with a high injury rate one year tend to have a better injury situation in the following year, while teams with an extremely low injury rate...
