Employment & Labor Insider

News sources (reputable and otherwise), as well as academic and other publications, regularly state that the average career in the National Football League is about three years. Sources making this claim include the Associated Press, The Wall Street Journal, and Statista). The reports often derive from statements made by the NFL Players Association (for example, Reuters, Washington Post, ESPN, Fox Sports) and have become so ubiquitous as to have the appearance of settled fact. 

In reality, the articles are a loop of unreliable data.

The definitional questions

One of the earliest instances of this claim is found in a 2002 New York Times article summarizing a recent Players Association report as follows: “The players union studied team rosters from the 1987 to 1996 seasons, an average of 1,647 players a year, or about 16,000 player years. The study showed the average career of an [NFL] player is 3.3 years.”

The Players Association has reiterated this claim over the years (for example, in 2011 and 2026), without ever releasing any substantive explanation of its analysis. News reports then regurgitate these statements without examination.

Even putting aside the age of the data, there are several problems with the simplified characterizations of NFL playing careers, most of them definitional.

First, “average” is a vague term. We all remember (or should remember) the more specific statistical terminology of mean, median, and mode. Although “average” is often understood in everyday conversation to be the “mean,” that is not always the case. Nor is it necessarily the most helpful or representative statistic, particularly without the context provided by the other two.

Second, who is an “NFL player”? The continuum here is harder than you might think. “Player” could include

• An undrafted player who signs a contract but never makes the 53-man regular season roster.
• A drafted player who signs a contract but never makes the 53-man regular season roster.
• A practice squad player who never makes the 53-man roster.
• A player who makes the 53-man roster but never makes the 46-man game day roster.
• A player who makes the 46-man game day roster but never appears in a game.
• A player who makes the 46-man roster and appears in a game.

Third, what does it mean to play a year in the NFL? Here the collective bargaining agreement between the NFL and the Players Association has definitions potentially useful to this question and the previous one. 

Employment in the NFL has two important measuring sticks. A “Credited Season” is one in which a player “was on, or should have been on, full pay status for a total of three or more regular season games.” The number of Credited Seasons is the benchmark used to determine eligibility for and compensation under various benefits programs.

On the other hand, an “Accrued Season” is one in which a player “was on, or should have been on, full pay status for a total of six or more regular season games.” With some caveats, players are typically on full pay status when they are on the 53-man regular season roster. Accrued Seasons determine a player’s free agent rights – three Accrued Seasons provide a player with restricted free agency, and four Accrued Seasons provide a player with unrestricted free agency (assuming his contracts are expired).

Does “a year in the NFL” mean one “Credited Season,” or one “Accrued Season”?

Neither the Players Association nor any of the above news articles bother to wrestle with any of these definitional questions.

The most egregious problem with the Players Association’s analysis comes from the fact that it seems to include every player who ever signed a contract with an NFL club, regardless of whether they ever made the club’s regular season roster or played in an NFL regular season game, in addition to players who were still active (and whose careers would eventually be longer than they were at the time the analysis was conducted).

As explained by the website Sharp Football Analysis, the Players Association redid its analysis before the 2010 season. The union counted anyone who was drafted in 2010 but had not yet had a chance to play in a game as having a career of 0 seasons. At the time, those players made up 19.5 percent of the NFL player population. The union counted players who had just finished their first season as having a one-year career, players who just finished their second season as having a two-year career, and so on.

The NFL’s response

In 2011, the NFL formulated a response to the oft-cited figure. The league said that for “players who entered the NFL between 1993 and 2002, the average career length for a player who is on his club’s opening-day roster as a rookie is 6.0 years.” This calculation is likely to have made the same mistake as the union’s, by cutting short some players’ estimated careers.

Otherwise, the only substantive criticism of the NFL data today would be that it is dated. 

A more objective examination by Sharp Football Analysis in 2011 found that players who were drafted between 2002 and 2007 have a mean NFL career length of 5.0 years. Although this analysis too does not define a “year” of play, it is probably the most reliable statistic for measuring NFL player career length.

A perpetual fumble

Sports are awash in statistics, so it is surprising that no careful and reliable analysis of this question has been done. And yet both the NFL and Players Association certainly possess the data to perform such an analysis. Because the data are available, the “will” is probably what’s lacking -- particularly for the Players Association, for whom the bad math has created sympathy and bargaining leverage.