I Crunched The Average Ages Of Every NFL Team To Put Together This "Official Longevity Disposition - Football Age Report Tracker" (OLD-FART)

Rich Schultz. Getty Images.

Welcome to the OLD-FART. A blog crunching the numbers on NFL team/player ages with an acronym I clearly started with first before figuring out what words make arguable sense for each letter. Suggested alternatives welcomed. But the point of the OLD-FART is to see where on the continuum teams are in age and we'll certainly cover some particular players worthy of remark as well.

Things are still a little fluid with roster changes so take this OLD-FART with a grain of salt but I put in a good bit of work joining active player data from Spotrac with another source to tack on each player's age. This OLD-FART is ready to fire away.

Let's reveal the official OLD-FART spectrum from top to bottom so you can see where your team falls. 

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The Packers are the youngest team in the NFL

Green Bay has elected to assemble a team of fresh puppies while telling the kids their two old dogs were "sent to a farm to live happily". It wasn't just Aaron Rodgers who's the oldest active player in the NFL at the moment either. It was Marcedes Lewis - the second oldest active player. 

But Green Bay isn't the only team opting for the Leonardo DiCaprio school of asset management. 

The Rams are… young now?

Seems like yesterday this team was trading all their draft picks for older veterans. Now they're the second youngest team in the league. Makes all the sense why Matt Stafford is having a hard time relating to his younger teammates as reported by Kelly Stafford.

It'll be interesting to see how an old quarterback like Stafford builds a rapport with the youngins. Out of the other bottom six teams on the OLD-FART graph, Mahomes is the eldest who entered in 2017, and everyone else is 2020 or later. Stafford entered the league in 2009. 

The Indianapolis Colt's oldest player is just 30

Let me introduce you to the Matt Ryan Effect. A player so old and decrepit on the field he ruins it for every other old out there. Perhaps the only player last year making you think you accidently hit the "watch at .25 speed" button, Matt Ryan's embalmed body might have ruined it for old guys not only on the Colts but the entire league. No joke. 

No NFL player is 40 years old or older

See? Wasn't kidding. This could be a legal issue for the NFL. As someone who's real job is HR-related (humble brag) I know that 40-year olds and older are a protected class from discrimination. You can't fire anyone from being old. You have to go the legal route and FRISK them first. Say what you want about HR, but whoever thought FRISK was as an appropriate acronym for progressive workplace discipline is an irony hero. 

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Anyway, sending the olds "to the farm" was the appropriate response from Jim Irsay and the Colts - legal or not. The transition from Matt Ryan to Anthony Richardson is easily the biggest shift in QB speed easily in the history of the NFL. 

That's enough about the youngins. Let's chat on the other end of the spectrum now. This is what the OLD-FART is really about anyway.

The Saints might actually be as old as Saints

Not only are the Saints the oldest team on average in the NFL, but they indeed have the most players 30 years or older with 13. 

You'll be hearing a lot of "Who dat?" in New Orleans this season. Not from the crowd, but from members of the team trying to remember who each other are. May as well bring in the actual St. Peter or St. Patrick to add some comparative youth to the squad. 

Random Fact: The only date that isn't at least one active player's birthday is October 27th

I did a Twitter Q and A on NFL age and someone asked if there were any dates in which no active player had a birthday on. A totally random and meaningless question so, of course, I dove right into it. The fact that there is an open date with no player's birthday out of some 1,700 players is pretty wild if you know anything about the birthday paradox. And October 27th is the ONLY date. But I'd have guessed it was December 27th if anything based on the following holiday nine months before that:

The Houston Texans are the anti Los Angeles Rams

While Stafford is running a day care in Los Angeles, rookie CJ Stroud will be visiting a nursing home to visit his backup quarterback Case Keenum and hospice unit resident, Robert Woods. Much like visiting a nursing home, Stroud will give players like Woods about ten minutes of his time before leaving to play with friends his age like Nico Collins and Dameon Peirce. 

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That's it for this OLD-FART. 

- Jeffro