Injuries caused the disaster that was the Broncos 2022 season

Football outsiders published their adjusted games lost data for the NFL 2022 season. The Broncos, as expected, led the league in AGL, which is a bad thing. The Bronco value of 148.6 was the highest in the league and was significantly larger than the second worst team - the Titans - at 122.9. The AGL for the 2022 Denver Broncos was one of the ten highest in the league dating back to the 2010 season when FO started gathering this data.

Adjusted games lost doesn’t just add up total injuries. It accounts for both absent players and those playing at less than 100%, and it gives more weight to injuries to expected starters and situational players than to expected backups.

The Broncos 148.6 was the sixth highest AGL value in history.

Of course, the Broncos have not had the highest AGL on average since 2018, that would be the Jets. The 49ers have also had a higher average AGL than Denver 2018-2022, but the Broncos are the third most injured team in the league over the last five seasons (or 30th most healthy, if you want to look at it that way).

As Aaron Schatz points out in his article, there is a correlation between AGL from one year to the next, so this is not just random. Teams that are injury prone tend to stay injury prone and teams that are not, tend to stay relatively injury free. Of course there is always going to be regression to the mean. The Steelers are not going to be as healthy in 2023 as they were in 2022, but if you focus on the Steelers in the color coded table, you find that they have a lot of green in their row. In fact their worst season (89.8) is not too far from the Bronco average season (76.8) over the entire time span. The Steelers were the healthiest team in the NFL in 2022 and they have an average AGL of 58.1 since the end of the 2009 season, which makes them the third most healthy team over this timespan. Only the Falcons (52.6) and the Titans (57.3) have been healthier over this entire time span.

Because of some relatively healthy years from 2010-2015, the Broncos are only 24th in average AGL from 2010-2022. Remember they are 30th from 2018-2022.