I’m one of the few Europeans who are absolutely crazy about football — the American one — and nearly a decade ago I decided that playing football myself was a good idea.

Now, even in my early twenties I was not athletically gifted. I was neither fast nor particularly strong, but I understood the game well and several years of judo gave me a good base and understanding of ‘leverage’.

Coach decided I should play on the offensive line — and thus began my love for the trenches.

I was an undersized center, in an undersized league. At 5'11" at 210 lbs (180 cm and 95 kg), I was no towering presence on the o-line. However, I managed to get by on technique and a higher football IQ than my defensive line opponents.

Injuries happened, life went on and I had to stop playing, but I’m still fascinated by the offensive line.

With NFL training camps about to start (and some downtime at work), I thought it would be interesting to look at the size of offensive linemen throughout time — or better said, the size of Super Bowl-winning offensive linemen throughout time.

The weight for all offensive linemen of all Super Bowl-winning teams.

In the chart above, the weight of 265 Super Bowl-winning offensive linemen is displayed (some players are of course included multiple times, as they kept winning). Throughout time, the weight of the offensive linemen increases quite substantially, from about 250 lbs to more than 310 lbs.

However, just looking at the weight may not provide a full picture. Height also needs to be taken into account.

The height for all offensive linemen of all Super Bowl-winning teams.

In this chart, the height for the same players is displayed (in centimeters, because I couldn’t be bothered entering feet and inches). The height of the players doesn’t seem to increase much over time, and it could be argued that the trend is so minimal that it’s more or less chance. The average height ist 193.5 cm with a standard deviation of 4.12 cm.

I then tried normalizing the data into an abomination of a measurement unit — pounds per centimeter, which I dub the “OL”.

An arbitrary, normalized unit of measurement, lbs per cm, for all offensive linemen of all Super Bowl-winning teams.

The chart above shows that, when correcting for height, the size of the offensive linemen did increase throughout time, from about 1.3 OL to 1.6 OL.

This is of course not a ground-breaking realization or a statistically significant finding by any means. I just thought it was interesting to see how much the size increased, and if it was simply due to larger players in height, or also an increase in mass. The latter actually appears to be more predominant, and height didn’t increase by the same proportion, if at all.