NFL QB Injury History

While starting running backs and some gifted pass catchers are dropping like flies to begin the 2020 NFL season, the most important position, quarterback, has been exceptionally healthy so far.

In fact, we’ve gone through training camp, the absence of a preseason, and now Week 1 without any noteworthy injuries to any of the league’s 32 starting quarterbacks. That’s an improvement from previous years like 2019 when Nick Foles was knocked out in Week 1, giving Gardner Minshew a quick intro to the job. In 2018, Foles started the season for Philadelphia while Carson Wentz wasn’t ready yet. In 2017, Andrew Luck never got ready and missed the entire season for Indianapolis. In 2016, Teddy Bridgewater’s gruesome knee injury suffered in practice ended his season before Week 1.

Hopefully this won’t be a jinx, but I updated the injury history data I’ve had on starters and even dug deep to include Ryan Fitzpatrick, who has only missed five starts to injury in his career. Below is the history for all 32 current starters, even including Joe Burrow who just made his NFL debut and plays his second game tomorrow. These are only injuries so any starts missed for playoff rest or getting demoted won’t show up here. Missed playoff games are also included.

Since these tables are large, the 32 players will be presented in three parts. The first table includes the eight unfortunate passers who have suffered at least two different injuries and have missed 10 or more games from them:

Ben Roethlisberger and Cam Newton have had a long injury history, but both avoided the real long-term absence until 2019 when they both missed the final 14 games. Both are back now and had good Week 1 returns on teams that I picked to win double-digit games and make the playoffs this year. Matthew Stafford also missed half of 2019 after not suffering any injuries since his first two seasons in the league when he was feared to be injury prone.

Our second group includes quarterbacks who had multiple injuries, but only missed 3-6 starts from them.

Fitzpatrick was a trip to research, because he’s been benched or demoted after keeping the seat warm more times in his career than he’s been injured. Drew Brees and Matt Ryan have been pretty close to injury free in long careers, but both had a slip up in 2019.

The last group is technically a combination of two groups: seven quarterbacks who suffered just one injury and 10 quarterbacks who have yet to miss a start to injury.

The latter 10 skew very young, but Philip Rivers (236) and Russell Wilson (144) have had incredible consecutive start streaks, and Dak Prescott and Jared Goff have both been very healthy since 2016. Let’s also not discount the fact that Kirk Cousins has yet to miss a start for an injury. He took Week 17 off for playoff rest last year.

As for the one-off injuries, it already happened to Daniel Jones and Dwayne Haskins last year as rookies. Tom Brady (2008) and Deshaun Watson (2017) had the more serious ACL tears, but otherwise have been rock solid in durability. The Drew Lock thumb injury last year was one of the few debatable ones. He injured his thumb in the preseason, but he wasn’t intended to start Week 1 with the Broncos bringing in Joe Flacco for considerable money. So his game count starts when Flacco’s season ended from injury and the team had to start Brandon Allen for three games before Lock made his debut and started the final five games.

Speaking of one-off freak injuries, Patrick Mahomes was very fortunate that his dislocated kneecap on a quarterback sneak only cost him two full starts in 2019, or otherwise that historic Super Bowl run may have never happened. Yep, it always comes back to Mahomes somehow.

Stay healthy in 2020, signal callers.