NFL Achilles

The NFL Achilles Epidemic: A 400% Increase Nobody Saw Coming

by
NFL

22 Achilles tears in a single season. That’s not a typo. That’s 2023, the year the NFL’s lower body injury crisis reached a breaking point that even the league couldn’t ignore. If you’ve been watching football over the past decade, you’ve noticed something disturbing. Star players are dropping like flies—not from the brutal hits we expect in a contact sport, but from the field itself. This isn’t random bad luck. It’s a systemic crisis defined by three distinct and devastating trends that are reshaping the NFL as we know it. And it seems nobody is raising the eyebrow on the rise of these Achilles injuries.  

Achilles tendon ruptures in the NFL have increased by 300-500% over the past three decades. In the 1980s and 1990s, the league averaged 4-5 Achilles tears per season. By 2009-2016, that number had climbed to 13-16 annually. But the real crisis hit in the 2020s. Recent seasons have averaged 17 tears per year, and 2023 shattered all records with 22 documented cases—more than quadruple the historical baseline.

When It Happens to Elite players

The 2023 season became the face of this epidemic when two of the league’s most prominent quarterbacks suffered the same devastating injury. Aaron Rodgers, in one of the most hyped debuts in recent memory, lasted exactly four snaps on the MetLife Stadium turf before his Achilles gave out. The injury ended his season before it truly began and reignited a firestorm about playing surface safety.

Just weeks later, Kirk Cousins—then with the Minnesota Vikings and in the midst of a career season—suffered an identical fate. Two franchise quarterbacks, two Achilles ruptures, two seasons obliterated. The trend hasn’t slowed in 2025. Running backs Austin Ekeler, and Najee Harris are out for the season along with 5 others and we are only in Week 5, only confirming that whatever’s causing this epidemic, it’s still very much active.

Why Is This Happening?

Sports medicine experts point to a perfect storm of contributing factors:

Player Size and Mass:

Today’s NFL athletes are bigger, faster, and heavier than ever before. That increased mass places exponentially greater stress on tendons, particularly the Achilles, which must absorb tremendous forces during cutting and acceleration.

Limited Off-Season Access:

Collective Bargaining Agreements that restrict off-season facility access sound great for work-life balance, but they’ve had an unintended consequence. Players aren’t getting the structured, supervised conditioning—particularly eccentric exercises crucial for tendon health—that prevents these catastrophic injuries.

The Turf Connection:

Research increasingly implicates artificial surfaces in Achilles injuries. The “stickier” nature of synthetic turf alters biomechanics and can increase peak forces on the tendon during explosive movements. When NFLPA analyzed injury data from 2012-2018, they found 69% higher rates of non-contact foot and ankle injuries on artificial turf compared to natural grass.

The ACL Plateau: Progress Stalled at the Worst Possible Time

While the Achilles epidemic represents a dramatic upward trend, ACL injuries tell a different—and equally troubling—story: progress followed by stagnation. The good news? ACL tears showed a modest decline through the late 2010s. From 2015–2019, the NFL averaged about 62 ACL injuries per year (EHR data). In 2023, the league registered 52 ACL injuries, down ~24% vs the prior two-year average.

Enhanced off-season training, sophisticated injury prevention programs, and improved risk management seemed to be working. The bad news? That progress plateaued. And worse, approximately 70% of ACL tears occur through non-contact or indirect contact mechanisms—meaning they’re happening without the violent collisions we associate with football injuries.

The Mechanisms Tell the Story

A comprehensive video analysis of 140 ACL tears between 2014-2019 revealed fascinating and disturbing patterns:

  • Wide receivers: 100% of their ACL tears came from non-contact situations—rapid deceleration, cutting, and direction changes inherent to their position
  • Offensive linemen: 70% of their tears came from direct contact, correlated with their massive size (players with BMI ≥35 kg/m² faced significantly higher risk)
  • The injury doesn’t discriminate by age or experience—rookies and veterans fall victim equally

The Medical Perspective: What Doctors Are Saying

Sports medicine professionals emphasize that no single factor causes these injury epidemics. But they’re increasingly vocal about surface-related concerns: “The biomechanical properties are fundamentally different,” explains one prominent orthopedic surgeon. “Natural grass allows energy dissipation through the surface. Modern turf has improved, but it still creates higher instantaneous peak forces that joints must absorb.”

The research backs this up. Studies examining force plate data and motion capture consistently show altered biomechanics on artificial surfaces—subtle changes in stride length, foot strike patterns, and joint loading that accumulate over thousands of plays.

The Bottom Line

22 Achilles tears in one season. A 70% non-contact rate for ACL injuries that won’t go down. Hamstring injuries that doubled when proper preparation was eliminated. These aren’t isolated incidents—they’re connected threads in a larger crisis that’s costing players their careers and teams hundreds of millions in lost value. The NFL prides itself on being the most technologically advanced sports league in the world. They’ve got sensors in shoulder pads, AI analyzing play calls, and medical staffs with MRI machines in stadium tunnels. But they can’t—or won’t—address the most fundamental question of all: what are we asking players to run on?

As the league enters its second century, the choice is becoming increasingly stark. Continue prioritizing stadium economics and operational flexibility, or acknowledge what the data, the players, and basic biomechanics are screaming: the playing surface is destroying careers at an unprecedented rate. Players have already expressed their opinions. They want grass. The question is whether the NFL will listen before we see another record-breaking injury season. Because if 2023 taught us anything, it’s that 22 isn’t a ceiling—it’s a warning.

Data compiled from comprehensive NFL injury surveillance (2015-2025), NFLPA safety research, peer-reviewed biomechanical studies, and ongoing joint NFL-NFLPA Field Surface Safety & Performance Committee analysis.

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