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In the last five years, the Kansas City Chiefs have been one of the youngest NFL teams, which relates back to them "going young" in the 2008 season with Herm Edwards. I remember at one point that Ryan Lilja was the only Chiefs player who was over 30 years old. Now those young players are growing up, which means the average age of the Chiefs is going up.
Chase Stuart of Football Perspective has a very cool chart looking at the average age of each NFL roster. Except this chart isn't just taking everyone's birthdays and averaging them out. They incorporated Approximate Value numbers from Pro Football reference in order to give a larger weight to starters vs. back-ups and important starters vs. less-important starters. This gives you a more realistic view of the average age of each NFL team.
The results say that the Chiefs are the sixth-youngest team, while the St. Louis Rams are the youngest. The Chiefs offense is also the sixth-youngest with the Seattle Seahawks being the youngest. The Chiefs defense is the 15th-youngest while the Rams defense was the youngest.
This tells us pretty much what we knew. The age of the defense is getting up there. This is a result of the Chiefs hitting on their draft picks and keeping them, such as Derrick Johnson, Tamba Hali and Brandon Flowers.
There are exceptions but a lot of good teams have older rosters and a lot of not-as-good teams have younger rosters.
Does the average age of the Chiefs roster factor into their Super Bowl window? Let me know what you think below.
