It’s simple to determine an NFL roster’s average player age, but a more meaningful statistic factors each player’s contributions to the team, giving more weight to the most important players and the players that most frequently see the field.
Chase Stuart of Football Perspective has done his AV-Weighted average team age the past few years using Pro Football Reference’s “approximate value” metric. AV, in simple terms, attempts to distinguish, as well as possible, “large contributions, very large contributions, gigantic contributions, medium-sized contributions, small, smaller, and negligible contributions” from players based on box-score types of variables (i.e., it’s not derived subjectively from watching film).
Stuart’s AV-Weighted average age, logically, gives more weight to players that contribute heavily, and what you come away with is a number that better reflects the average age of the team’s most important players. It’s not the be-all and end-all of statistics but it does make more sense than just taking the overall average age of a team, when you can have a few older backups who never play or are sitting on the sideline with an injury skew the age up.
As Stuart told us back in January, the Seahawks had the 2nd youngest AV-weighted team in the NFL in 2013, including the youngest offense in the NFL. In fact, using AV-weighted average age, the 2013 Seahawks were the 2nd youngest Super Bowl Champion team of all time. At 26.0 years old per AV-weighted average, on their way to their Super Bowl title, they went 13-3, finished #1 in Football Outsiders’ DVOA for the second straight year — the first team to do it back-to-back since the 1996-97 Packers — and finished in the top-10 for all time best DVOA marks for the second straight year. This is incredible.
The youth movement is not new for Seattle though. Based on Stuart’s weighted age metric, the Seahawks had the youngest roster in the NFL in both 2011 and 2012.
As for 2012’s Seahawks (26.1 years old per AV-weighted average) it was a whirlwind — after a slow start, Seattle finished the year red-hot, compiled an 11-5 record with historical scoring binges and a league-best scoring defense, bounced the Redskins from the Playoffs in their place, and very nearly succeeded at closing out one of the great comebacks in NFL Playoffs history before falling to Atlanta. 2011 (average of 25.7 years old) was a rough, but necessary building year.
Of course, if using AV weighting is too abstract and vague for you, Football Outsiders has simplified it one step, using snap counts to weight players to find teams’ average ages. FO’s findings are very similar to those of Stuart’s AV-weighted rankings.
Per their 2013 snap-weighted age charts, the Seahawks had the youngest offense in the NFL (25.8 years old) and the third youngest overall team in the league at 25.9 years old, behind only St. Louis and Cleveland. The insane thing about this is that Seattle is likely to get even younger on average in 2014, with the subtraction of Red Bryant and Chris Clemons’ snaps from the rotation.
My point? Well, I don’t really have one that I haven’t already talked about numerous times in the past. But, while Pete Carroll and John Schneider constantly espouse their philosophy of fielding a roster of young, hungry players, I may only implicitly believe their talking points. It’s still always somewhat surprising when the numbers bear out that Seattle is in fact consistently one of the youngest teams in the NFL.
