The Most Likely Position in Football to Get Injured

A friend of mine asked the following question: "what is the most likely position in football to get hurt at?" And the answer is: Offensive Lineman.

The end!

No but here's my underlying analysis: I decided to focus on NFL players, since injury data is more reliable and also more readily available (thanks to fantasy football). I could pull players on the PUP (Physically Unable to Perform) and IR (Injury Reserve) lists, but since we're currently in the preseason, those lists won't show the collective toll of injuries over the full course of a season.

Thankfully Football Outsiders broke down games lost to injury by position at the end of last season, which we can use as a proxy to answer the question. But what about adjusting for time spent on the field? Thankfully this metric incorporates this, since starters spend more time on the field than reserves, and their metric, Adjusted Games Lost (AGL), does the following:

(1) Injuries to starters, injury replacements and important situational reserves matter more than injuries to bench warmers; (2) Injured players who do take the field are usually playing with reduced ability, which is why AGL is based not strictly on whether the player is active for the game or not, but instead is based on the player's listed status that week (IR/PUP, out, doubtful, questionable or probable).

I then took these results and calculated the average AGL across each position group:

Rank	Position	Avg AGL
1	OL	17.23
2	DB	15.83
3	LB	14.64
4	DL	11.63
5	RB	8.91
6	WR	8.18
7	TE	5.69
8	QB	2.30

The average team lost Offensive Linemen for 17.23 games last season, which is over 8 times the average time lost for Quarterbacks: 2.30 games. Predictably, the offensive stars seem relatively protected: RB, WR, and QB all fall in the lower half of this list.