Longtime Chicago cornerback Charles “Peanut” Tillman was placed on season-ending injured reserve this week after he tore his triceps against San Francisco this past Sunday.  This marks the second season in a row Tillman’s season ended early due to the injury.  With two straight injury-shortened seasons and a contract that expires at the end of the season, this seems to be the end of the road for the 33 year old cornerback, though Tillman has vowed his career is not yet finished.

If Tillman has indeed reached the end of his career, he has nothing to be ashamed of.  The 2003 2nd round pick has played 12 years, all for the Bears, and generally played at a very high level.  He reached two Pro Bowls (2011 and 2012), was named a 1st team All-Pro once (2012), and holds franchise records for defensive touchdowns (9), interception return yards (675), interceptions returned for touchdowns (8), and forced fumbles (38).  Tillman also owns the franchise forced fumbles record for a single season (10, tied for NFL record) and single game (4, NFL record).

Canton worthy?

There is little doubt that Tillman is the greatest cornerback the Chicago Bears have ever had, which is no small feat considering the illustrious defensive history of the franchise, but a more interesting question posed to me by Lorin Cox was this: does Charles Tillman belong in the Hall of Fame?

This is a difficult question to answer as there are a number of factors that go into a player’s Hall of Fame candidacy.  Let’s start with a look at the numbers, which were kindly provided by Lorin. The table below compares Tillman’s vital statistics to those of several recent defensive backs who were inducted into the Hall of Fame, as well as two active players who will undoubtedly go into the Hall of Fame after they are done.  Note that all of the above statistics about Tillman’s franchise records above are from the official Wikipedia page listing Chicago Bears records. These may differ slightly from the stats listed in the table below, which are from Pro Football Reference.

Looking at these numbers, two things stand out. First, if this is indeed the end of Tillman’s career, he did not play for as long as most of his compatriots. This will hurt his volume numbers some and may damage his Hall candidacy.  Second, Tillman’s numbers absolutely stack up, even on a volume basis.  He has more tackles and defensive touchdowns than three of the other seven players and has forced more turnovers than four of them.  His forced fumbles stand out well ahead of the group, thanks largely to his signature “Peanut Punch.”  If there is one place where Tillman is clearly lacking, it is in interceptions; his 36 falls well short of the rest.

When you look at per-season numbers, however, Tillman’s case begins to look even better, as you can clearly see in the table below.  His 3.27 interceptions per season fits in nicely, and his forced fumbles per season dwarfs everybody else.  Tillman rates well against his peers in both tackles per season (2nd) and turnovers per season (first by a mile).

More than just numbers

Of course, there are many more factors to consider than just numbers when evaluating a player for the Hall of Fame, especially for defensive players who are not pass rushers, as statistics often fail to accurately reflect their play.  We’ll start with the areas where Tillman excels before moving on to where he might struggle.

The 50 media members who vote for the Hall of Fame often take off-field actions into account, and Tillman’s sparkling record there can only help his cause.  Tillman was named the NFL’s Walter Payton Man of the Year in 2013 and has a long history of charity work and community involvement in Chicago.  He seems like a genuinely nice guy who everybody likes and respects, which can go a long way in the voting room.

Tillman also has a well-publicized signature play, the Peanut Punch.  This has increased his national profile and should help him get votes as well.  The Hall of Fame is partially about telling the story of the NFL, and being well known for something that coaches now try to teach their players helps make it easier to consider you an important part of that story.

But there is one essential area where Tillman is very lacking that I think will ultimately keep him out of the Hall of Fame.  Tillman has simply not garnered enough national awards for his play.  He has only been to two Pro Bowls and was only named an All Pro-1st or 2nd team-once.  It will be extremely hard for the national media to convince themselves that Tillman was one of the best players of his generation when he was only considered one of the best four players at his position one time in his entire career.  If he had been voted to a bunch of Pro Bowls, that might help overcome the lack of All Pro nominations, but alas, that did not happen.  It seems kind of silly that a popularity contest based on fan voting would be a factor in determining who is worthy of the Hall of Fame, but that does indeed appear to be the case.

Hall of Very Good

Now that I’ve told you that I don’t think Tillman will make the Hall of Fame, I’m sure some people are wondering if I think he should.  I’m sorry to say that, when looking at things objectively, I don’t.  Tillman was a very good player for a very long time, but I don’t think he was consistently great.  Therefore, I don’t think Tillman belongs in the Hall of Fame, as much as it pains me to say it.  To me, Tillman is the definition of a guy who belongs in the Hall of Very Good, a term I believe was coined by Peter King (though I cannot find a source to confirm this).  He was a very good player and a great man, but is just not quite at the caliber of somebody who deserves to be immortalized in the Hall of Fame.

So here we are.  It is painfully obvious that you cannot win in the NFL without a good quarterback.  It is equally apparent that, if you find that quarterback, you are eventually going to need to pay him a lot of money to stick around.

If you pay your quarterback too much money, it can hamper your ability to build a good team around him (a must for a championship winning team), leaving you with a good team that will be consistently competitive but probably come short of winning a title as teams with comparable quarterbacks playing on much cheaper deals are able to pass you by (before they have to pay their guy as well).

You have to think that there is some sort of tipping point where teams would be better off dumping a high-priced veteran and taking their chances in the draft, and the rapid recent inflation of quarterback contracts may make it that we are passed that point.  But it will take more time to really know for sure.  To date, no quarterback has won a Super Bowl on a contract averaging more than $16.5 million per year, but the first contract exceeding that didn’t come until two or three years ago, so that’s a very small sample size.

Differentiation at the top

Of course, one other thing you have to consider here is that there is a difference between quarterbacks like Peyton Manning, Tom Brady, Aaron Rodgers, and Drew Brees and guys like Matt Ryan, Joe Flacco, Jay Cutler, and Tony Romo.  All have similar contracts paying them massive amounts of money, but the second group needs better talent around them to perform at a high level (and will still likely not reach the same level as the first group on a consistent basis).

You can build a championship team around Romo, Cutler, Flacco, or Ryan, but I am not sure if you can do so while paying them that much money.  This will be an issue for teams like Seattle, San Francisco, and Carolina in upcoming years; their quarterbacks will be due for new contracts and go from being underpaid to overpaid, forcing the teams to let some of the talent around them leave because they can no longer afford to pay them.

Let’s look one more time at the groups of teams based on quarterback situation and how they performed in 2013.  One twist this time: I’m splitting the thirteen teams with established veteran quarterbacks into the four elite quarterbacks (Peyton Manning, Tom Brady, Aaron Rodgers, and Drew Brees) and the other nine.  Let’s see how the data looks.

Well that’s interesting.  Paying established non-elite veteran quarterbacks  big money, at least this year, didn’t seem to pay off.  Teams with those guys actually fared slightly worse, by and large, than teams with slightly worse but significantly cheaper quarterbacks.  Consider that the group that might be looking for new quarterbacks this offseason-Cincinnati, St. Louis, Tennessee, and Arizona-paid their starting quarterbacks an average of just under $5.4 million in 2013, while the nine teams with non-elite quarterbacks on veteran contracts-Atlanta, Detroit, New York Giants, Chicago, Pittsburgh, Baltimore, Dallas, Kansas City, and San Diego-paid their quarterbacks an average of $12.6 million.

This is only one year and is a small sample size, but it certainly suggests that paying a non-elite quarterback big money (which every one of those nine teams except Kansas City has done) is not a recipe for success.  Those teams were worse on average in wins than the teams with unsettled quarterback situations going forward, put roughly the same proportion of teams in the playoffs (two out of nine compared to one out of four), and neither group found much playoff success (combined 1-3 playoff record, with the one win coming when San Diego beat Cincinnati, so one of the teams in these groups had to win).

Paying your elite quarterback, meanwhile, appears to be an investment well worth making.  Elite quarterbacks got paid big money-an average of $15.2 million in 2013-but delivered.  All four of them made the playoffs, three of them won at least one playoff game, and one of them will be playing in the Super Bowl.  The performance of elite quarterbacks, in fact, is nearly identical to that of established quarterbacks on rookie contracts, which will be something interesting to monitor in future years.

Looking ahead

One way or another, we will see in the next several years just how intelligent the recent quarterback salary inflation is.  The early results suggest big contracts for non-elite quarterbacks will come back to haunt their teams, but it is too early to say for sure. If teams can continue to win consistently after giving quarterbacks big money, the salaries should only continue to grow.

But what if new teams like Seattle and San Francisco keep cropping up for two or three year runs when they find a good young quarterback who is extremely cheap and are able to contend by using that extra money to put a great team around them?  What if recent large contracts handed out to second-tier quarterbacks (and ones soon to be given out to guys coming off rookie deals) end up hurting teams more than they help?

It’s all about the quarterback in the NFL, but the next five to ten years should help illuminate just how much a good quarterback is worth.

Detroit Lions wide receiver Calvin Johnson had a historic 2012 season, setting a new NFL record with 1,964 receiving yards. Perhaps his most impressive feat is that he did this despite going against Richard Sherman and Charles Tillman, the two cornerbacks who made the All-Pro team, in three of his 16 games. In other words, Johnson (or “Megatron,” as he has been dubbed), played three games against the two best cornerbacks in the NFL and still shattered the record for most receiving yards in a season.

How well did Johnson perform in those three games? The answers might surprise you. Let’s take a closer look at the per-game numbers.

It’s apparent that Johnson did not fare very well against top-flight cornerbacks. His completion percentage was significantly lower than either Tillman or Sherman gave up for the year (47.1% and 63.3%, respectively, per ProFootballFocus); the same was true for his yards per target against both Sherman and Tillman (7.3 and 5.9, respectively).

ProFootballFocus assigns grades for players for each individual game based on how well they perform relative to average. In the three games against Tillman and Sherman, Johnson posted three negative scores that together added up to -2.6. By contrast, his other 13 games featured 11 positive scores for a cumulative total of 28.9.

What does this mean for Johnson and the Lions?

Megatron destroys most opponents

Take a second look at those numbers Johnson posted in those other 13 games. He was stellar, averaging over 10 yards per target and 140 yards per game. Sure, some of it was against lesser opponents with terrible pass defenses (the Jacksonvilles and Tennessees of the NFL), but there were some other solid pass defenses in there too: Arizona, San Francisco, Minnesota, and St. Louis jump immediately to mind. The fact that Johnson could still break the previous yardage by over 100 yards record despite having these three poor games speaks volumes to just how incredible he was in the other thirteen.

Credit Tillman and Sherman

The success that these two cornerbacks had against such a dominant receiver speaks volumes to just how great they were last year, especially since on multiple occasions they were left to cover Johnson alone. This is also a testament to the rest of the Chicago and Seattle secondaries, especially the safeties, often helped double-team Johnson. Voters don’t always get their selections for the All-Pro teams right, but in this case they were 100 percent correct in saying that these two were indeed the best cornerbacks in football last year.

Pressing needs

If they want to become a winning team again, the Lions need other passing options to emerge as reliable targets.

Even though Johnson was unable to make plays against Chicago and Seattle, quarterback Matthew Stafford still threw his way an average of 11 times in those games. Admittedly, that was down slightly from the 13.3 targets Johnson averaged in the other 13 games, and it was also a slightly smaller percentage of total teams targets (24.1% versus 27.7% on the season); but that is still too many targets for a player  struggling to produce.

Against Seattle, Titus Young was able to take the pressure off Johnson, converting his nine targets into nine receptions, 100 yards, and two touchdowns. In the two games against Chicago, nobody was stepped up. Not coincidentally, the Lions beat Seattle and lost twice to Chicago.

Detroit has already made one move to improve their passing game this offseason, signing running back Reggie Bush, a pass-catching specialist out of the backfield. They also will get receivers Nate Burleson and Ryan Broyles back healthy. The Lions need them to take advantage of favorable coverage due to teams blanketing Johnson, which will in turn also help reduce the coverage on Johnson and free him to make more big plays.

Conclusion

Calvin Johnson is an incredible player, one who has clearly established himself as the best wide receiver in the NFL over the last two seasons. But his struggles against top-shelf secondaries show that he is not invincible, and the onus is now on Detroit to surround him with the necessary talent that will allow him to dominate against even the best competition.

Rookie bargains

When the new collective bargaining agreement (CBA) between the NFL and players’ union was put into place prior to the 2011 season, one of the big changes from the old CBA was the rookie wage scale. Gone were the days when players drafted in the top five became the highest-paid player at their position in NFL history before playing a single down.

Green Bay’s offensive hallmark in the last five years has been their passing game, which makes perfect sense when you consider that they have an all-time great quarterback in Aaron Rodgers. However, two successive playoff failures have made many think that Green Bay, which has not had a rusher go over 750 yards since 2009, needs a feature back who can give them a solid running game.

Many fans are looking longingly at free-agent running back Steven Jackson, who has been a very good running back on many very bad St. Louis Rams teams in the last eight years. ESPN NFL analyst John Clayton has also publicly stated that he thinks this would be a great idea, suggesting that signing him for $5 million would be a great deal for the Packers.

On the surface, this move makes perfect sense. Putting a dangerous running back in an offense that is already explosive can only help improve it. But is this actually the case, and would such a hefty investment be worth it for an older back?

Steven Jackson has already played eight years in the NFL, and he has almost 2400 career carries.  That’s some serious mileage, and it’s fair to worry about diminishing returns once a player has taken that many hits. Let’s look at other running backs in the last twenty years who have more than 2400 carries, and see how they fared.

Looking at the table, it’s hard to think that signing Steven Jackson would be a good idea. Only three of the eleven backs in similar situations to him improved their production after 2,400 carries, and one of those (Warrick Dunn) did so in an extremely limited sample size (186 carries). Of the 33 100-or-more carry seasons by these backs after they had ,2400 carries, only seven (21%) averaged better than their first 2,400 carries. By contrast, nineteen of them (58%) found the backs performing at a clip that was at least 0.3 yards per carry worse than their average from their first 2,400 carries.

To put these numbers in perspective, Steven Jackson has averaged 4.2 yards per carry in his career so far. Based on historical numbers, then, he would have roughly a 20% chance of averaging 4.2 yards per carry or more for the Packers, and close to a 60% chance of averaging 3.9 yards per carry or less. There were 31 NFL running backs who had 100 or more carries while averaging 3.9 yards or more in 2012, including five rookies, four of whom were drafted in the third round or later.

This is the second part of a two-part series. In part one, we looked at consistency trends of quarterbacks throughout the NFL. Here we are going to examine in greater detail the consistency and production of the four NFC North quarterbacks.

The previous installment featured a study of all 24 NFL quarterbacks who have started at least twenty games for the same team between 2011 and 2012.  Conveniently, Jay Cutler, Christian Ponder, Aaron Rodgers, and Matthew Stafford—all four quarterbacks in the NFC North—fit that description.  So let’s look a little closer at those four in an effort to better understand just how they compare to each other in terms of consistency and overall production.

Consistency

The overall numbers showed that Aaron Rodgers was far and away the most consistent of the four quarterbacks; his passer rating standard deviation of 20.5 marked him as the third most consistent in the NFL. Matthew Stafford came in at 23.5, slightly more consistent than average, while Christian Ponder was on the other side of average with a standard deviation of 27.2. With a standard deviation of 30.0, Jay Cutler came in as the least consistent quarterback in the entire league.

Let’s dig in a little deeper to see more clearly the distribution of their games relative to their average passer rating that season. The chart below compares the percentage of games that are within 10.0 points of their average, between 10.1 and 20.0 points of their average, between 20.1 and 30.0 points of their average, and more than 30.0 points away from their average. The table also lists the percentage of games in which the quarterback is more than 50 points away from his average, but it should be noted that this is a subset of the 30 point group and those two are therefore not exclusive of each other.

There are a few interesting trends to note here. First, observe that Rodgers, the most consistent quarterback, has a significantly lower percentage of game right at his average than either Stafford or Ponder. What makes Rodgers so consistent is that he avoids the extremely varying games that are more than 30 points from his average passer rating. All of his games basically fall within a range of 60 points (i.e., ± 30 from his average).

That is not the case for the other quarterbacks, particularly Cutler and Ponder; nearly one-third of their games fall more than 30 points from their average passer rating. A large reason why Cutler has the largest standard deviation an insanely high proportion of his games — 16.0% — fall more than 50 points from his average. This is more than four times the NFL average and nearly doubles that of any other quarterback.

Overall production

It is important to note that all of the statistics discussed to this point have been about quarterback’s average and their production relative to that average. This ignores the difference between the average production of the quarterbacks, which can be fairly substantial when you consider that Aaron Rodger’s average passer rating of 114.9 is nearly 30 points better than that of Matthew Stafford, the second-best quarterback in the division with an 88.1 passer rating.

So let’s put some clarity in this discussion by looking at real numbers instead of simply averages. The table below shows the percentage of games that have fallen in various passer ratings by the average NFL quarterback (the 24 in the overall study) and each of the four NFC North quarterbacks. The graph below that shows the same numbers in a visual format.

These numbers show three clear groupings in the NFC North quarterbacks. Ponder produces an abnormally high number of bad games without really having many really good ones (only one game with a passer rating above 120), making him a below-average NFL quarterback. To be fair, Ponder has only finished his second year, so he still has significant room to grow. Stafford and Cutler both have roughly average numbers, at least in terms of their most typical passer ratings, although Cutler does have an atypically high number of really bad games.

The true standout here is Aaron Rodgers, as he incredibly has no games with a passer rating below 75 in the last two years (in fact he has none below 80); he is the only quarterback in this study who can claim that remarkable feat. The typical Rodgers game resides in the very good category, with relatively equal numbers of average and great games.

This clearly illustrates the difference between Rodgers and the rest of the NFC North quarterbacks. A bad game for Rodgers, when his passer rating is in the eighties, is an average game for Cutler, Ponder, or Stafford. An average game for Rodgers is a very good or great one for one of the other three.

This is not an earth-shattering revelation. Rodgers is clearly the best quarterback in the NFC North and by most statistical measurements is also the best quarterback in the NFL. It is truly remarkable, however, to look at just how large the gap is between Rodgers and the rest of the quarterbacks in the division.

Conclusion

This is the part for all you lazy bums who don’t feel like doing much reading (that’s all of you, including me). I’m going to put my findings in simple, easy-to-digest bullet points so you can skip all the long, confusing words above!

• Aaron Rodgers is one of the most consistent quarterbacks in the NFL because he is exceptional at avoiding games with extreme passer ratings (relative to his average).
• Jay Cutler is the least consistent quarterback in the NFL because he has an incredibly high rate of games that are either really good or really bad.
• A bad game for Aaron Rodgers is an average game for any other NFC North quarterbacks.

Introduction

Football announcers are fond of saying that an outstanding quarterback is “consistently excellent” — or conversely bashing an underachieving quarterback by saying he “needs to improve his consistency.”

Based on comments like this, there seems to be a prevailing theory out there that the elite quarterbacks in the NFL are separated from the pack by their consistency.  Do the statistics back this assertion up?  Let’s dive in and take a look.

Because I am a giant stats nerd, I just had to dig into this and see if there was any truth to the conventional wisdom. This is the first installment of a two-part series in which I will examine the consistency of NFL quarterbacks. This installment will explore league-wide trends, while the second part will focus on the four NFC North quarterbacks.

To the statsmobile!

Numbers and tables

To find the simplest method possible of measuring quarterback consistency, I looked at the standard deviation of game-by-game passer ratings for quarterbacks in the last two years. Ignoring playoff games, I included only quarterbacks who made at least 20 regular-season starts for the same team between 2011 and 2012. A total of 24 players qualified for this study. These numbers were chosen to find the best middle ground between getting a large enough pool to do a meaningful study and having a large enough sample size for each individual to get meaningful results.

The table below shows the 24 quarterbacks examined, along with their passer rating over the last two years and the standard deviation of their single-game passer ratings. A lower standard deviation means there is less variability — or in other words, that a quarterback is more consistent.

Looking at the spread of this data, we can see that it shows what statisticians call a “normal distribution,” which is a fancy way of saying that the frequency of the numbers peaks around the mean (average) and tapers off toward either end of the range. In this case, the range is roughly 20 to 30.

Lessons

A quick glance also tells us that more consistent does not necessarily equal to better: five of the six least consistent quarterbacks rank in the top ten for passer rating over the last two years. Indeed, there is almost no correlation between a quarterback’s average passer rating and his standard deviation(r²=0.002). In other words, there is no indication that consistency is necessarily a marker of excellence, for a quarterback can just as easily be consistently bad as consistently good.

This makes intuitive sense. St. Louis Rams quarterback Sam Bradford has put up the most consistent passer rating in the NFL the last two years — but no one would accuse him of being an excellent quarterback. There is no value found in being consistently mediocre.

The next two most consistent quarterbacks, however, have been two of the best in recent years. Ask the average NFL fan to name the best two quarterbacks of 2011 and 2012, and the most common answers would likely be Aaron Rodgers and Tom Brady (Drew Brees would be in the mix as well), and indeed, they rank as two of the top three in passer rating. Interestingly, though, seven of the top ten highest-rated quarterbacks rank in the bottom half for consistency.

This suggests that, among the top quarterbacks, what separates the truly elite players from the rest is their ability to avoid bad games and be consistently excellent. The numbers suggest that may be possible, as the correlation between passer rating and standard deviation rises to 0.38 if the sample size is limited to the top ten highest passer ratings It should be noted, however, that 0.38 still represents a relatively low correlation.

Now I want to look briefly at one interesting case for a quarterback who did not qualify for this study because he missed the 2011 season: Peyton Manning. I am looking at quarterbacks playing for the same team, so rather than combine his 2010 and 2012 numbers (which featured him plying his trade in two different cities), I decided to look at his numbers from 2009 and 2010. In those years, Manning posted a passer rating of 95.6 with a standard deviation of 22.2. His passer rating would rank only sixth in this study — likely because he missed out on the passing bonanza that was 2011, when defenses suffered tremendously from the lockout and shortened training camp — while his standard deviation would score him as the fifth most consistent quarterback.

These numbers actually muddy the waters a little bit: Manning falls short of the elite benchmark in passer rating but is still relatively consistent (similar to Ben Roethlisberger).

Conclusion

Those of you who don’t like wading through a whole long article full of numbers — in other words, all of you — can skip straight to this point and read what I learned in easy-to-digest bullet points!

• There is no statistical relationship between consistency and effectiveness for NFL quarterbacks.
• It looks possible, but is not proven, that the truly elite quarterbacks are separated from the merely good ones by being consistently good.
• Second-tier quarterbacks are some of the most inconsistent in the NFL, probably because they fluctuate so often between good and mediocre.

Stay tuned for an upcoming look at the NFC North quarterbacks!

“If only our guys had stayed healthy.”

This common lament from NFL fans at the end of a disappointing season reflects the harsh reality that injuries are an unavoidable part of football.  I don’t particularly like using injuries as an excuse, but there is no denying that the health (or lack thereof) of certain key players can have a dramatic impact on a team’s fortunes in a season.

With that in mind, I thought I’d take a look at the four teams in the NFC North to see how they were affected by injuries in 2013.  I had some difficulty here in trying to find one perfect metric for looking at injuries, and ended up settling on four different ways.  No one of them is perfect , but together they should give you a pretty good idea of how badly teams were impacted by injuries.  Before we get to the numbers, let’s take a minute to briefly explain each method.

Procedure

WARNING: if you don’t care about how I did what I did and just want to see the results, you should save yourself a lot of time and skip to the results section.

The first metric I examined was games missed due to injury.  This simply counts any time a player on the roster is ruled inactive for a week due to an injury.  This is useful for seeing how much injuries impacted the roster as a whole, but completely ignores the value of a player.  A superstar quarterback missing a game means a lot more to the team than a fringe roster player who only plays on special teams, but they both count the same here.

The second metric, therefore, is starts missed.  This looks only at games missed due to injury by players expected to be starters with a fully healthy team (so the standard eleven on offense and defense, plus a third wide receiver and cornerback).  This helps distinguish in player value a little bit, but still treats all starters equally when in fact that is not close to being accurate.

The third metric looks at starts missed by Pro Bowl performers, that is, players who have made a Pro Bowl since 2012 playing for their current team.  The idea here is to look at players who are high-impact starters expected to be the best players on the field.  The flaws are that the Pro Bowl voting system is far from perfect, and again, there is still a difference in value between a star quarterback like Aaron Rodgers and a nice fullback like John Kuhn, both of whom qualified as Pro Bowl players here.

Finally, I looked at money lost due to injuries, assuming each players gets 1/16^th of his cap for the season.  So if a player has a cap hit of $16 million for the year and missed one game due to injury, the team just “lost” $1 million.  The general idea is that teams pay their better players more money, but there will always be guys who are overpaid or underpaid, sometimes dramatically (Chicago defensive end Julius Peppers, for example, had the second highest cap hit in the NFC North this year but did not play anywhere close to that level).  Players who particularly get overlooked here are young players playing well on relatively small rookie contracts (think of guys like safety Harrison Smith and tight end Kyle Rudolph in Minnesota).

So again, let me emphasize that no one approach is perfect here.  Different teams will appear to have larger injury issues than they actually did (or vice-versa) if you look only at one of the four metrics, but looking at all four should generally give us a solid idea of how teams fared relative to each other.

I should also mention that all salary cap numbers come from Spotrac and all injury information is from Pro Football Reference.

Results

Here are the totals for each team in the NFC North in the four injury areas.  For those who are curious, the raw data can be seen here.  I had bold and italicized fonts to indicate starters and Pro Bowl players, but it didn’t copy and paste from Excel to Google Docs, and I didn’t care enough to go back and add it in manually.  Sorry.

Discussion

In three of the four areas, the Green Bay Packers comes out as the NFC North team that suffered from injuries the most in 2013.  This is probably not very surprising to anybody who followed the division closely this year-their injury woes were well documented-and makes their division title all the more impressive.

What is interesting to me is that, despite having almost twice as many games lost due to injury as any other NFC North team, the Packers were not that far off from some of the others in starts, Pro Bowl Starts, and money lost.  This suggests that a good number of their injuries were to backups and special teams players, although they still certainly lost their fair share of top-shelf talent as well.