Over the last ten seasons has OL health gotten better, worse or not changed at all?
A couple of years ago I started looking at ways to measure the overall health of a team’s offensive line during a season. I started by using games started, but that led to some confounding results. So I have moved to using snap percentage.
Starting offensive lineman generally play every offensive snap if they are healthy. The only other position on offense that can say that is quarterback. So using snap percentage (player snaps/total team snaps) to track league-wide offensive line health is a viable method.
The Denver Broncos OL was quite healthy in 2024, but in 2022 and 2021 the OL was one of the least heathy OL’s in the league. In 2021 they were the worst with zero offensive linemen playing 90% or more of the offensive snaps, although an argument can made the the Rams and Cardinals had it worse with only 1 player topping 80% or 90%. The Bronco OL had 3 top 80%.
The healthiest OL that the Broncos had over the past 10 seasons was in 2016. The Bronco OL health score was 6.4 during both seasons, but that was 3rd in 2016 and 14th in 2015. So let’s talk about how I get to this OL health score. It weights players with 90% heaviest (multiply by 3) then adding players with > 80% of the snaps, then it subtracts players with >20% and a portion of the total number of OL who played (>0%). An OL where all five played every snap would have a score of 13.0. The highest score 12.2 achieved by the 2019 Colts and the 2022 Steelers. The Colts in 2019 had five guys plays >90% of the snaps and only used seven total offensive linemen (with a few plays that had six offensive linemen). The 2022 Steelers did that exact same. If a team had zero offensive linemen play >80%, 12 that played >20% and 15 that played any snaps, that would be a value of -18.0. SO we will say that is the lowest possible value.
The highest average during this span was 0.2 in 2018. While the lowest team average was -1.5 in 2023. That’s fairly good for metric where you want the average to roughly zero.
The least healthy OL was the 2022 Rams who obtained a score of negative 13.0. They only had one player who took more than 80% of the snaps and they used an astounding fifteen offensive linemen during the season. The average team has ten take snaps on offense during the season.
The trendline for both OL with 90% and 80% snaps has been going down steadily since 2015 if you look at the trendline, but it is much more pronounced in the 80% line.
With a few more years of fairly static numbers of OL guys with >90%, that could flatten out the trendline. The >80% trendline is worrisome, as it would seem that it has become very difficult to keep OL guys healthy enough to play four out of five offensive snaps over the last ten seasons. I don’t have data goes back beyond 2015, so I am not sure what would happen if this study were extended.
