The Cleveland Browns having a young roster is not surprising. As we shared earlier, just two players currently sit over the age of 30 with underrated Joel Bitonio right at 30 years old.
With years and years of trying to build through the NFL draft, it was not surprising for the Browns to have young rosters for many of their non-competitive years. What has been surprising is that the roster has stayed young despite a playoff run in 2020 and even higher aspirations in 2021.
Going into the 2022 season, Cleveland has just seven players 28 years old or older on their 90-man roster. Only the Detroit Lions, with four, have fewer.
In a new graphic, we can see that the Browns have only had a roster older than the NFL average in one of the last nine seasons, in 2015:
Which teams have had the oldest and youngest initial 53 over the last nine seasons?
Left-most bar is 2013, right-most bar is 2021. pic.twitter.com/k3fEtlXVxR
— Anthony Reinhard (@reinhurdler) June 4, 2022
In ’15, players like Josh McCown, Randy Starks, Karlos Dansby and Tramon Williams helped push the team’s average age up.
The 2017 team looks to have the youngest roster of any team over the past nine seasons.
Taking a look at each team’s nine-year history shows a couple of interesting points.
- Only three teams did not have a roster over the league average during this time: Green Bay, Jacksonville, Los Angeles Rams
- The Kansas City Chiefs joined the Browns as having only one season over the media league age roster
- The Arizona Cardinals did not have a roster below the league average age in the last nine years
- The Atlanta Falcons and New Orleans Saints spent the first eight years of this study above the average before coming down near it in 2021
While youth is often assumed to be a part of bad teams, three of the five teams with one or no years above the average age have been good for most of the decade. The Browns and Jaguars have mostly struggled while also being young.
If the Packers, Rams and Chiefs are a model for the Browns, the team is set up to stay competitive with a young roster for years to come. The Saints and Falcons could be reference points later in Cleveland’s competitive window for how to stay successful despite having an older roster.
With quite a few high-priced contracts, the Browns will likely rely on players on rookie contracts to help balance their salary cap and keep their average roster age down.
