A deep dive into the Saints' injuries shows team is getting injured at an unprecedented rate. How bad is it?

The Saints are the most injured team of the past two seasons.

It's a fact that the New Orleans Saints are suffering soft-tissue injuries at a higher rate than any other team this season or last season, and it's a significant contributing factor to the team's recent losing skid.

There isn't a perfect way to go about doing this study. Players get injured and go on injured reserve, and there often isn't an explanation for what happened. So, to create a fair and even baseline, I looked at the last injury report of the week from the last two seasons and counted all the players who were listed as either out, doubtful or questionable with what appeared to be a soft-tissue injury. Did some make it through the siphon with something other than a soft-tissue injury? Almost certainly, because people like to lie on these reports, but the point is that we've come up with a highly accurate estimation using the available information. All numbers are through Week 6.

The Saints listed 20 guys with soft-tissue injuries during the season's first six weeks, which is the most in the league. Las Vegas (16), Pittsburgh (15), Tampa Bay (12), Jacksonville (12), Houston (12), Carolina and San Francisco (11) are the only other teams to top 10.

The Saints are listing 3.4 guys weekly with a soft-tissue ailment, which puts them on pace for 59.5 this season. Last year, when Green Bay lost players at what seemed like a historic rate, it ended up listing 44 guys with soft-tissue injuries, a rate of 2.5 per game. The Packers were the only team to average more than two listings per week last season, which made their rate seem like an extreme outlier until the Saints' number this season.

We're early in the season, so there are a handful of teams over the mark of two right now, but those numbers will drop after they get some players healthy and maintain health for the rest of the way. The key to maintaining a high number is having new injuries, which might be the most staggering thing about what's happening with the Saints. They've had 14 different players show up on the injury report with soft-tissue injuries.

Dennis Allen has said a few times that he wasn't bothered by the soft-tissue injuries last year and that the team actually had done a good job preventing them, and he isn't wrong. New Orleans only averaged 1.6 per game, which is a pretty average and unremarkable number, something that exists in the normal range. This year, he's bothered by it and said he's keeping a close eye on the data, but the uptick isn't due to any major changes.

"There really hasn't been a whole lot that's changed," Dennis Allen said. "And I don't know that we can put our finger on one thing in particular. I think we're still working through those things and begin to minimize those things as much as possible."

With other general injuries included along with the soft-tissue ones, the Saints have actually had better luck than last year overall. They're putting an average of six guys on the final report of the week when including all injuries, which is down from the 6.8 last season. Their overall injury number is 41, which is the third-highest overall behind New England (50) and Tampa Bay (42). The soft-tissue ones are tipping the scales this year, whereas last year, most of the injuries were unavoidable.

How have the injuries looked dating back some years? We went back to 2018 and looked at how many cumulative games did teams have players miss due to injury, including injured reserve stints, to get a raw total. Here's how many games Saints players missed each season from 2018–2022.

2022: 268 (4th most)

2021: 250 (9th)

2020: 174 (15th)

2019: 195 (16th)

2018: 158 (23rd)

Injuries have been on the upswing a little bit, but those 2022 numbers are a bit skewed by having guys like Albert Huggins, Jerald Hawkins, Ethan Greenidge, Forrest Lamp and Smoke Monday on injured reserve. That's a lot of games lost on players who weren't going to contribute.

Injuries have been creeping up for a little bit in the last few years, though, and that's partially the impact of having an older roster. New Orleans is definitely on the wrong side of this trend right now, though, and it needs to figure out how to level out if there's any shot of turning this season around. Attrition is real, and there's too much of it on this roster right now.