The player equipment has also become much more advanced, but is it helping or hurting? They should go back to leather helmets and no pads (like rugby) and see what happens.
NFL players: height and weight over time
41–50 of 135 posts
Re: NFL players: height and weight over time
#42Fantastic viz.
So, they pushed up on the height parameter, but hit a ceiling.
Then they've started to push further on the weight parameter, where the "ceiling" is more flexible.
You can bulk up to some extent, but your height is pretty much a given.
Re: NFL players: height and weight over time
#43What's interesting is before the 1970's it appears as though there is just one group of players, at which point they become three. Then, over the following 40 years these groups seems to just get heavier - most likely a response by teams to maintain heavier players than their opponents in certain positions. While the general growth over time makes sense, I wonder what caused the shift specifically in the 70's.
Everybody is saying steroids, but another thing that happened around the 1970-80s is that college football became a much bigger business:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/College_football_on_television#...
Re: NFL players: height and weight over time
#44Apparently the breeding program is working.
Re: NFL players: height and weight over time
#45Earlier quoted context omitted.
Ugh, on [3], watch out for the non-zero axes. NHL and NBA start their axes at 0, while the others do not. Very tricky, and very deceiving. I think NFL would look very similar to NBA if plotted the same way (they're both within ~10-15% of the expected value).
My guess with NBA players would be that the proportional increase in their heights would be higher. Does anyone know changes to average weight/height for the population in the US?
I think it would be average weight for NBA players. Modern NBA players are a lot more muscular.
Re: NFL players: height and weight over time
#46I wonder if this has compounded the TBI and concussion issue over the years. I think sports medicine in general has gotten much better and the average player is probably bigger and stronger and thus able to hit harder than 20+ years ago...
Malcolm Gladwell has looked at this issue[1]. He sees football as being analogous to dogfighting. Popular at the time and with fans, but the science behind it is scary. I've experienced a severe traumatic brain injury (sTBI), meaning I've seen many brain doctors. I have seen a neuro-omptomolgist (brain-eye doctor) who sees a football player who can't even add up his checkbook (meaning he can't add, not this his check…
When I was in high school I was a Division I football prospect. I had multiple schools after me: Alabama, Florida, LSU, etc. I really wanted Miami (this was the '80s) but deep down I really wanted to play basketball. I only got a little sniff of DI basketball interest but I went on a football visit to Florida and saw massive guys hitting each other and thought "I'm going to get killed" and never took the football scholarship. I'm a big guy - 6'4", 225, I was pretty close to that size in high school and I was a pretty angry teenager so hitting guys at full speed was in my...well, 'nature'.
So please consider this when I say that those college guys were jacked up on 'roids' and WAAYY too big for me. I didn't take steroids in high school but I was big enough and strong enough (and in truth, angry enough) to play against those kids on 'roids anyway. I knew in college, I wouldn't have been.
I walked away from a certain Division I college scholarship (at the time - I blew out my knee a year later) despite what my coaches were calling a 'no-brainer' to play football. I've NEVER regretted it and each year that has passed since has made me even more glad I did it.
Re: NFL players: height and weight over time
#47Very interesting how you can definitely see 3 distinct groups emerge in recent years. I'm guessing linesmen are the majority of the group that really shifts over to the right.
I am a baseball fan so I am biased, but when I saw those groups form, my first thought was performance enhancing drugs. I sure hope there is another reason...
Re: NFL players: height and weight over time
#48I'd like to see how the general population changed in the same time, then maybe a revision of this graph keeping it in perspective of how the rest of the population changed.
I don't think general population changed at all.
I think it's fair to say the average weight of the general population has grown quite a bit in the past century...
Re: NFL players: height and weight over time
#49What sort of method would be used to cluster those, statistically speaking? Like, given a data set like that, how would you determine if the distribution is multi-modal or unimodal?
Mean shift clustering, for one. This short PDF provides better insight than wikipedia. Does NOT require you to specify the number of clusters like in K-means: http://homepages.inf.ed.ac.uk/rbf/CVonline/LOCAL_COPIES/TUZE... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mean-shift Example python code using scikit-learn: http://scikit-learn.org/stable/auto_examples/cluster/plot_me...
Awesome! Thanks for the knowledge
Re: NFL players: height and weight over time
#50Steroids. Relevant: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bigger,_Stronger,_Faster*
Steroids don't make you taller. Also if you devote yourself to nutrition and weight lifting, as a 6 foot male it's not too hard to exceed 200 pounds. I don't doubt steroids play a part, but there are many other factors (in addition to just the fact that football became a national obsession so is attracting more potential players).
And prior to 1940, the same players played offense and defense, along with limited substitutions. These days, players not only play one position but are often substituted out depending on the particular play or formation. That lets players specialize and, I'd argue, put on body mass for their more limited role.