Quote:
Originally Posted by BigHairedAristocrat
i find it amusing that people make a big deal about this.
the difference between the youngest team (25.9) and the redskins (28.1) is slightly more than two years. the average, middle-of-the pack age for a team is 27.2. So the Redskins are, on average, about 10-1/2 months older than the average NFL team.
who the heck cares? Ideally, ever team would have a mix of veterans and young, promising players at every position. The only position where i think having a lot of younger guys really comes in handy is running back, and thats only because running backs generally stop performing at a high level when they reach 27 or 28. At pretty much every other position, id much rather have veterans anyway.
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I think you're missing the point of an average. If every player on every team we play was just 2% better than the person that we were asking to block/tackle them, you might argue that hey, that's not a big difference, we're almost an average team. But because a football game is not one play (much like a roster is not just one player), you'd go 1-15 against a league that has a 2% advantage at 11 positions on 100 plays in a game.
When you multiply two years by the # of players on the roster, either 86 right now or 53 for the season, it helps to put in perspective. If we assume a 53 man roster, we have 116 more years of age on our team than the Texans have on theirs.
Or to ignore the averages for a second, we currently employ 20 players who are or will turn 30 before December 31st of this year, by far the highest number in the league.
For sake of argument, if a team drafts 5 22 year old college players to replace 5 32 year old veterans on the roster, the team gets only 0.9 years younger. But if every other player on the team is one year older (and unless you know how to reverse time, this happens to every team every year), the other 48 players account for an average age gain of 0.9 years of team average age. Basically, by replacing 160 combined years of age with draft picks each year, all a team is doing is offsetting the overall effects of age, not making a net gain.
When you don't have draft picks, teams have a tendency to fill the roster spots that other teams are filling with picks with veterans. So to be one of the 6 or 7 teams that has an average age of more than 28.0, you merely have to pick in the draft less often than 25-28 other teams over a three year period, and then pretty much every team you play has the age advantage.
Last year, we averaged something like 27.5, or right around the league average. It's hard to gain 0.6 years/player in an offseason, but we've certainly earned it.