Injuries have a large impact on a team`s success during the season. Typically teams with more injuries, especially those affecting the most valuable players, will perform worse than similar teams with fewer injuries. A common way to quantify a team`s injury burden is by simply counting the number of injuries or games missed due to injury. However, these measures do not account for the individual value of the players injured. We assess two frameworks for how injuries may be weighted by player value. We propose a new position-weighted metric based on franchise tag values to measure injury burden in American football, called weighted Adjusted Games Lost (wAGL), and we test another player-level metric, Wins Above Replacement-Adjusted Injuries Lost (WAIL). WAIL uses a proprietary calculation of player Wins Above Replacement from Pro Football Focus. By comparing these measures to a gold standard of injury burden using pre- versus end-season betting lines and team strength estimates, we find that wAGL is a better measure of injury burden than current alternatives across all team-seasons considered.
© Copyright 2025 Journal of Sports Analytics. IOS Press. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.