Seven. Seventeen. Sixteen. Four. Seventeen.
That is Christian McCaffrey's attendance record, 2021 through 2025 — 61 games played out of a possible 85, which ranks 238th of the 472 players in our five-season table. He missed close to three weeks of 49ers camp this month with what the team called tightness, he was back in individual drills on Sunday, and the reaction ran ahead of the injury report both ways: panic while he sat, relief when he jogged back out. Underneath both reactions is the oldest cliché in the sport: the best ability is availability.
Here's the thing about that sentence. If availability is an ability, it should behave like one. Abilities repeat — that's most of what makes them abilities rather than events. So we asked the question directly: does taking the field repeat?
The number with no memory, part two
Take every qualified player-season since 2021 — at least 100 carries-plus-targets, or 250 pass attempts for a quarterback — and line it up against the same player's next season. That's 510 consecutive-season pairs, all from 17-game schedules.
Almost everything about a player's role comes back the next year. The depth he's targeted at repeats at a correlation of 0.90 — on the scale where 1.0 means a season repeats itself perfectly and 0 means it tells you nothing. His share of his team's air yards comes back at 0.79. Targets per game, 0.68. Even touchdown rate per target — the number analysts wave away as luck, correctly — comes back at 0.205.
Games played comes back at 0.182. Lower than the luck stat. The least repeatable thing we measure about a player is whether he plays.
And that's the average. Split it by position and it gets stranger: quarterbacks 0.217, running backs 0.143 — and wide receivers 0.001. For an established receiver, the number of games he played last season tells you literally nothing about the number he'll play this season. Not "a weak signal." Zero, to three decimal places, across 148 pairs.
The iron-man season is not a forecast
It cuts the way you'd never guess. The 186 players who answered the bell all seventeen times averaged 13.75 games the following season. The 214 players who missed a game or three averaged 13.79 — the two groups are indistinguishable. Fewer than one in three of the perfect-attendance seasons (30.1%) got repeated, and 32.3% of those players missed four or more games the very next year.
The 2025 casualty list is what that looks like in names. Tyreek Hill played all seventeen in 2024 and four in 2025, before a knee injury ended his season — he's rehabbing now as a free agent. Garrett Wilson went from seventeen to seven. Terry McLaurin, seventeen to ten.
And it runs the other way just as fast. Justin Jefferson's last five seasons: 17, 17, 10, 17, 17. For exactly one winter — after the 2023 hamstring — he wore the fragile label. He has missed zero games since, sits at 91.8% for the half-decade, and the label just quietly evaporated, the way labels do when nobody has to answer for them.
Where the label has teeth
One group does carry signal. The 110 players who missed four-plus games averaged 11.79 the next season, and half of them — 50.0% — missed four-plus again. That is a real, repeatable difference, and it's the honest core of "injury-prone."
But look at what the number actually says: a coin flip. The other half came back and played a mostly full season; one in five (20.9%) came back and played all seventeen — which is roughly how often the iron-men themselves did it. The label reads the past accurately and then massively overstates its confidence about the future. History, in this table, is a lean — never a sentence.
Two honest caveats before anyone carries this to a draft. First, a "game played" is a game with a stat line — the number can't tell a hamstring from a healthy scratch or a benching, which is why we've kept the claims to skill positions and stayed away from backup quarterbacks. Second, our pairs require a next season to exist: the 3% of qualified players who never appeared again — retired, released, or lost for a full year — drop out, so the downside in the missed-four-plus group is, if anything, a touch understated. Neither caveat rescues the iron-man tag; the group it flatters is the one with no signal at all.
Nobody finishes whole
The widest lens is the plainest one. Of the 472 players with at least three seasons and twenty games in the window, exactly three took the field for every game their team played while they were on the roster: Bijan Robinson, Jaxon Smith-Njigba — both measured over three seasons — and one man over all five: DJ Moore, 85 of 85. Perfect attendance for half a decade — and this offseason the Bears traded him to Buffalo anyway. Even the table's one certainty changed addresses.
The typical qualified running back showed up for 69.2% of his team's games across the window; the typical receiver, 70.8% — read those two numbers again if you're sure running backs are the brittle ones. And if 2025 felt healthy to you, it was: 61 of 129 qualified players played all seventeen, 47%, the highest share of the five seasons. One season, though — and by this newsletter's own rules, one season is noise.
Two weeks ago in this space: records get borrowed, turnovers get borrowed, close games are almost entirely borrowed, and what a team owns is its intent. Players are the harder version of the same lesson. A player owns his role — the routes, the depth, the trust, everything north of 0.6 in our table. His health he only rents, and the lease is month to month.
Real or Noise
The verdicts, calibrated. These grade the story, not the player.
- "You can pencil in McCaffrey's missed games": leaning noise. The history is real — 61 of 85, 238th of 472, and the missed-four-plus group he's twice belonged to does re-miss at 50%. But 50% is the strongest availability signal that exists in this data, and it's a coin flip — and he enters 2026 off a seventeen-game season, from the group that carries no signal at all. Price the risk; don't book it.
- "Bijan and Smith-Njigba are safe because they never miss": leaning noise. The 100% is real and it isn't protection: perfect-attendance players averaged 13.75 games the next season, the same as everyone who missed a couple, and fewer than a third repeated the feat. Draft them for the 0.9-repeatable stuff — the role — not the streak.
- "Running backs are the fragile position": leaning noise. Five-season availability: running backs 69.2%, receivers 70.8% — a point and a half apart. And games played is less predictable year to year at receiver (0.001) than at running back (0.143). The position that breaks is mostly the position you happened to watch break.
The Receipts
Verified numbers worth keeping in your pocket.
- Games played repeats at 0.182 across 510 qualified consecutive-season pairs, 2021–2025 — below every role and production number in our player table, including touchdown rate per target (0.205). For wide receivers alone it is 0.001.
- A perfect-attendance season predicts nothing. Players who played all seventeen averaged 13.75 games the next season; players who missed one to three averaged 13.79. Three in ten iron-man seasons got repeated.
- Three players out of 472 had perfect attendance for the window — and only one across all five seasons: DJ Moore, 85 of 85. The typical qualified player showed up for about seven of every ten games his team played.
Where to hear it
Muffed is an AI that reads every play, every box score and every advanced stat from all 32 teams — and tells you the real story of the game. Every number above was checked against the source data before it shipped. That's the house rule, and the receipts are in the footer.
The audio version of any player's season is one click away: Christian McCaffrey, Justin Jefferson, Bijan Robinson, Jaxon Smith-Njigba. During the season, Muffed builds a weekly show for your favorite team or your fantasy roster — muffed.ai.
And if someone forwarded you this: the Read is free, every Wednesday, and it's better when it just shows up. Subscribe and it will.
Next week: the last Read before real football. What we'll be watching from the opening kickoff — and how this newsletter changes once actual games exist.
Methodology: window is the 2021–2025 regular seasons (all seventeen-game schedules), positions QB/RB/WR/TE, nflverse weekly data; a "game played" is a regular-season game with a recorded stat line, so absences include inactives and benchings as well as injuries. A qualified season is 100+ carries-plus-targets (250+ attempts for quarterbacks); year-over-year pairs take a qualified season and the same player's next season, any appearance — 510 pairs; qualified seasons with no following-season appearance (3%) are excluded and disclosed above. Availability percentages are from our verified five-season table (minimum three seasons and twenty games; denominator is team games while the player was on that roster). Correlations are Pearson r. Base rates are historical averages over the stated samples, not forecasts. Data via nflverse.