The 2022 Detroit Lions were the franchise’s most successful team in several years. They did so despite being one of the NFL’s youngest teams of the last two decades.
Using a metric known as “snap-weighted age” from Football Outsiders, the 2022 Lions were indeed quite precocious. Detroit’s snap-weighted age, or SWA, was an NFL-low 25.3 years old. It quantifies the age of the people actually playing the snaps, which differentiates it from the overall roster age.
The defense, in particular, was extremely young. Detroit’s SWA on defense was just 24.8 years old. It made the Lions’ defense the only one with an average SWA under 25.
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From Football Outsiders,
The youngest teams in 2022 were very young, historically young in fact. The overall SWA for the entire league has dropped gradually over a decade before stabalizing at 26.4 during the last four years. But one result of the league as a whole getting younger is that the youngest teams in SWA are all recent. The Lions were the fourth-youngest team since 2006 and the Chiefs ranked seventh.
The last two years of the Lions rank 4th and 5th in terms of the youngest SWA since 2006, when Football Outsiders began tracking the data.
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