Thin Air Research

Last Monday, disaster struck the New York Jets despite winning their season opener. Their high profile roster acquisition of Aaron Rodgers went down for season with a torn Achilles tendon after playing only four snaps. This led to much criticism over the artificial turf in East Rutherford, New Jersey. Rodgers’s former teammate David Bakhtiari was very quick to condemn the playing field. NFLPA executive director Lloyd Howell made it clear that the union wants grass surfaces for all NFL games. Criticisms over artificial turf have lasted almost as long as has it’s been used, of course–but Rodgers’s serious energy has risen the salience of the criticism once again.

Given this currently high salience, I thought I’d try to take a look at some history of recorded injuries on grass versus artificial surfaces. Thanks as always to the compilation of play by play data by nflverse, it was easy enough to compile such recordings in gamebooks from 2011 to 2022 to gain a little bit of insight on the subject. The compiled data can be found on this page.

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In college football, the USC Trojans have a custom known as the Perfect Day. This custom is quite simple: a perfect day for USC and its fans is when their team wins, and their archrivals in UCLA and Notre Dame both lose. That feeling of joy can port over to any team in any sport, and certainly the NFL is no exception. Any supporter of an NFL team will feel good when they see that team gain a game on all their division rivals within just one week. This article will take a look at the perfect weeks that have occurred since the merger, when a team wins and all of their division rivals lose.

The central page for perfect weeks can be found here.

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The tackle is one of the most context lacking statistics in football. The act of the tackle itself is of course discrete: one or two defensive players wrestling an offensive player to the ground. But what each tackle means to the goal of the defense varies widely, and cannot be described meaningfully by a simple tally of how many tackles a player has made, as is common on traditional NFL stat views. This article will try to add some context to the tackle.

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