Many big media analysts, Twitter scouts, and fantasy gamers have been throwing around the idea that elite running back Jonathan Taylor’s usage at Wisconsin is a negative, stating he is now more injury prone due to such high volume at the college level. Some even contend that Taylor may not make it to his second NFL contract.

I wanted to dig into the data to see if there was any correlation between college workload and NFL injury, or between college workload and NFL career length. So I gathered data on all players selected in the NFL draft with more college carries than Taylor, how many games they missed after entering the league, and how many years they ended up playing in the NFL. Note: Due to a lack of data for some older players, this may include games missed that were not due to injury, such as healthy scratches. This actually furthers the point I’m going to make. I divided each player’s total games missed by their career length (in years) to calculate their average games missed per year in the NFL. If a player was classified as retired for a year, or was suspended for a full season, I did not count this as a year played.