“Upon further review” is a recurring segment in which This Given Sunday analyzes quirks and fascinating tidbits from the NFL’s history books.
That, courtesy of osufan77 on Reddit, is a photograph of the Akron Centuries in 1910. You’ll notice that fewer than 20 players are pictured. That isn’t because more than half of the roster missed team picture day — it’s because that was the size of a football roster then.
Another Redditor posted this plague of the 1922 Canton Bulldogs, who were an original NFL team from the league’s inception in 1920…
Again, fewer than 20 players, plus a canine and a couple of coaches.
And yes, those were their uniforms. That was their equipment, aside from those beautiful leather helmets, which couldn’t have done much to prevent head injuries. Hell, you might as well be bare-headed. And sometimes, that was the case.
Of course, players are bigger, stronger and faster now. That’s a cliché, but that doesn’t make it untrue.
In 1920, the Akron Pros won the first-ever NFL — or as it was known then, American Professional Football Association — championship. Only one player on Akron’s roster was taller than 6-foot-1, and only one — the same dude — weighed more than 210 pounds. Today, only cornerbacks and wide receivers are, on average, smaller than the biggest player on that Akron roster.
The average height and weight on that roster was 5-10, 190 pounds. That Bulldogs team pictured above, which won the NFL title in ’22, averaged out at 5-11, 203 pounds.
In 2013, the league’s smallest team in terms of both height and weight was Houston at an average of 6-1, 235 pounds. On the other end of that, the Buffalo Bills were almost 6-3 on average, while your average Carolina Panther was 254 pounds.
Take medians from all of those extremes and your average NFL player has grown from about 5-11, 197 pounds to about 6-2, 245 pounds in about 95 years. That’s a four percent increase in height and a whopping 24 percent increase in weight.
So yeah, the league has changed a little bit over the last century.
