What position should you play in the NFL?

Tell me your height and weight, and then I’ll tell you what position you’d be playing in the NFL. That seems to be the lesson we can learn from the visualization shown below. Of course it doesn’t tell us if you’re going to play offense or defense, so you’ll have to decide that by yourself. Or let your coaches do that for you.

The visualization shows the correlation by position between height and weight of current active NFL players. It was compiled by Dr. Craig M. Booth who until recently worked as a computational astrophysicist at the University of Chicago.

What is so great about this visualization is that it’s intuitive, understandable and it confirms many of the stereotypes many of us have about the different position player types. Wide receivers and cornerbacks are the lightest players on the field and linemen occupy the other end of the spectrum (tall and heavy).

The visualization made its rounds on internet message boards and forums a couple of weeks ago. Most of the comments apart from the obvious (fascination) centered around the fact that it was strange to see how clustered the weight/height relation was for each position. But if you follow the NFL long enough you’ll know that this should be expected. Every offseason there’s a story about a different player who’s considering switching position and in order to do that he needs to gain/lose weight.

This happens because NFL as a league is in many ways very conservative. In other words the many position coaches that crowd rosters of NFL and college teams have a mental map in their mind resembling the visualization Dr. Booth presents. So when a Linebacker is contemplating moving to Defensive End his position coaches will usually tell him to spend the offseason putting on 30 extra pounds (of muscle).

It could be interesting to see how the map of different position players’ height and weight has changed over time. That way you could see the effect of different events over time like how legendary Linebacker, Lawrence Taylor, changed the Left Tackle position (see Michael Lewis’ book “The Blind Side” for specifics).

While the visualization in itself didn’t surprise me as much as it fascinated me, there were a few surprising takeaways. Here is my list of the 3 biggest surprises from the visualization.
1. Defensive linemen have bigger variety of weight than offensive linemen
2. Cornerbacks are on average shorter than the wide receivers they cover
3. There is a Wide Receiver who’s only 5' 5" (1.65 m)

Note: The visualization used in this blog is taken from this Business Insider article