There has been a lot of debate over the past couple of years regarding concussions in the NFL. It seems as though that brain injuries are much more frequent in football today rather than the football of our parents and grandparents generations. My theory is that the number of brain injuries has increase due to the competitiveness of the sport. In my opinion, the increased competitiveness is due to the rise in salaries. The hope of landing one of these contracts has made the sport more competitive than ever. This has caused the players to work harder and they are becoming bigger, stronger and faster every year. That being said, I would like to see if there is any correlation with the number of brain injuries that are sustained with the average amount of money a NFL player makes.
I gathered data on the number of concussions sustained in a season from numerous sources. This includes concussions from the start of training camp through the Super Bowl. This data ranges from the 1994 season to the 2012 season. It would be difficult to determine average player salary over this time period because each team spends a different amount of money every year so I had to calculate the average player salary. There is a salary cap, or the maximum amount of money a team could spend in a year, and each team is allowed to have 53 players on there roster. So to calculate the average salary, I divided the salary cap by 53. This data can be seen in the table below.
From 1994 to 2001 the only concussion data available from a study that included the total number of concussions that were sustained over those years. The study did not provide the number of concussions for each year, only the summation of them. So the mean total was used for each year. The graph below has the concussion data plotted with the salary data.
We can expect the average salary for a player to increase over time because the NFL has increased in popularity and are making record profits. What you wouldn't expect is for the concussions to increase over time. The game of football is still played the same way and there are still the same amount of players on each team. One would expect that the number of concussions should decrease because there have been a number of rule changes to increase player safety.
A second question that i wanted to answer is what is the most are some positions more dangerous than other positions? Does their salaries reflect that?
Another organization did a study to keep track of concussions from 2010 to 2012. The total amount of concussions in this data differs from the previous data presented because they only kept track of concussions during the regular season and playoffs. This data is organized by position below.
It appears that it is more dangerous to play on offense than on defense. This can be illustrated in the pie chart below.
If the data is broken down by position it clearly shows that being a defensive back is the most dangerous position with 26% of concussions occurring at this position.
The table below shows the average top 5 salaries for each position and the number of concussions sustained for each position.
It is clear the quarterbacks have it best in the NFL because they have the lowest total of concussions and they also make the most money. To gain a sense on which position is is underpaid in terms of concussions, the average salary was divided by the number of concussions over this time period to figure out how much money a player makes for each concussion that they suffer. By using this metric, it is clear that defensive backs have it the worst. Even though they make the third most in salary, they also have more than double the amount of concussions than other positions and each $30,000 less money per concussion than the second to last position.