If you’ve ever watched football and like us thought “a lot of these guys seem to be getting hurt”, this SportsBall is for you.

🤕 💥 🧮 NFL injury data explained
🏈 🇺🇸 🏆 Is the Super Bowl more American than…
💘 🤩 🕵️ A new sports x celebrity couple

LEARNING MODULE 💡 

Injuries 🏈 🤕 

Nothing’s worse than getting injured as an adult. Especially for non-athletes like ourselves, tweaking, pinching, pulling, or straining anything at any time is an immediate nuisance.

When watching an NFL game, it's remarkable to see 300-pound athletes collide with the intensity of a car crash for an entire hour.💥 This spectacle naturally leads to the question: how frequently do these refrigerator-humans incur injuries?

So when 49er Dre Greenlaw tore his Achilles before the first play of the game in the Super Bowl, it got us thinking about what the bigger impact on the season can be. 🤔

In any given game, there are an average of 4.2 injuries out of the 106 players on both teams. As we know, the world isn’t fair and some teams are impacted by this much more than others. ⬇️

We connected injury data to yearly salary data of NFL players to understand the dollar impact on each NFL team.

As you can see below, some teams get screwed while others float along happily in good health. 😇 

If you’re a Chargers, Jets, or Browns fan, we understand the disdain you have for the 49ers and Chiefs who suffered only 10% of your financial injury impact.

Despite meticulous season preparations, any team in the NFL can still fall victim to the unpredictability of injuries.

Consider the Browns and Jets in 2023. The Jets, led by Aaron Rodgers, were in the limelight before the season, but that quickly changed when Rodgers suffered an Achilles tear in the opening game. The Browns, with Deshaun Watson, faced adversity with three key players injured for most of the season.

Both teams had their high hopes for the 2023 season quickly shattered much like our New Year's resolutions by - checks calendar - February 15th. 📅

The chart below showcases the costliest injuries in the 2023 NFL season. This visual highlights the duration of each affected athlete's injury and correlates the time missed to the financial impact per game.

The total financial impact of injuries in the NFL is staggering. 💸 In the 2023 season, the league’s cost of injuries amounted to $692 million.

To put this into perspective, considering that each team's salary cap is $225 million annually, the cost of injuries equaled the combined salary cap of three entire teams. 3️⃣

The moral of the story: either stretch or don’t play tackle football.

THIS PAST WEEK ⏮

Super Super Super Bowl Sunday 🏈 

Didn’t we say Super Bowl 58 would be the most-watched football game ever? Well, we were right. 😎

Sunday’s broadcast featuring the Chiefs and 49ers drew 123.4 million viewers, rivaling only the Apollo 11 moon landing 🚀 (125 million) for the most viewed television program ever in America.

We did a further analysis of the viewership and played a game of “Is the Super Bowl more American than…🇺🇸” with very important results below.

No, not that celebrity couple! 💘

While the world watched Taylor and Travis steal the show at the Super Bowl, another superstar/athlete relationship was reported on by TMZ; and just in time for Valentine’s Day. ❤️

Kim Kardashian and Odell Beckham Jr. have allegedly been spending time together discreetly. There are even claims that they have been in a relationship for almost a year — not sure how that didn’t surface in season 4 of Kardashians but I’ll take it up with Hulu.

Regardless, this is quite the catch for OBJ. 🎣

I thought this was “the gentleman’s sport?” ⛳️

The Waste Management Phoenix Open is the only golf tournament that encourages fans to get rowdy. While most golf enjoyers are a bit older and more reserved, the WMPO attracts the energized, hydrated youth. 🍺 Put differently, if the rest of the golf world is Facebook, the Waste Management tournament is TikTok.

Surprise surprise, this year’s tournament got a bit too rowdy. There were ticketing problems that allowed too many fans in, people were breaking into VIP drinking areas, and fights erupted throughout the crowd. 🥊

The Scottsdale Police Department just reported their crime statistics associated with the tournament which boasted more yearly growth than NVIDIA stock ⬇️

Tragedy in the running community 🏃🏾

Kevin Kiptum, the Kenyan world record marathoner was killed in a car accident on Sunday along with his coach.

Kevin was the first person to run a marathon in under 2 hours and 1 minute at the 2023 Chicago Marathon, a blazing 4:36 per mile pace. 🥇 He was also the most primed athlete to soon break the “impossible” 2-hour mark for a marathon. Incomprehensible speed for a rising star who the running world will sorely miss.

At only 24, Kevin was expected to continue breaking records for years to come, with his near-term sights set on winning the Paris Olympics.

THIS NEXT WEEK ⏭

Then there were 2…

For just over a month, the NBA and NHL are the only sports in action. Both will be ramping up in intensity as playoff races form and come April baseball will be back!

UFC 🥊

If you’re looking to inject a bit of violence into your life, UFC 298 is this weekend. In fighting, the group of fights is called “the card” and the card is great on Saturday.

The night will be capped off by the Featherweight title fight between Alexander Volkanovski and Ilya Topuria, tune in at 7PM PST to get your fix.

Super Bowl Party Props 🎉

Thanks to everyone who entered into Super Bowl Party Props over the weekend. We had more than 80 submissions with some people doing a bit better than others…

After a rigorous Ernst and Young™ audit, we have a winner. There were 10 questions and only one person got 9 of them right to win the coveted custom sweatshirt. 👕

We loved the involvement from you all and can’t wait to do more of that in the future! 🔮

Thank you all and have a fantastic weekend!

— Claire and Riley

Keywords: NFL injuries, Super Bowl, celebrity couple, financial impact, Super Bowl viewership, NFL injury data, NFL salary data, Super Bowl party props, NFL teams, Achilles tear, NFL season, Kevin Kiptum, UFC 298, Alexander Volkanovski, Ilya Topuria, sports injuries, Super Bowl party, sports data, NFL statistics, sports analysis