RESOLVING THE LEDGER
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See the full story · 1 sourcesChicago media personality Dan Bernstein recently made a claim that Dennis Allen’s coaching style makes his players more injury prone , citing that many around the Saints felt Allen was the cause of their injury-plagued 2024 season. He also claims that something in his coaching approach has caused the rash of injuries to Chicago’s defense since Allen showed up in January 2025.
Today, I want to look at the evidence to see if the numbers back up the claim that Allen’s teams are consistently injured. Correlation alone doesn’t prove causation, but we don’t need to worry about why injuries follow Allen around unless we see whether they actually do.
The Setup
The metric I’m going to use is Adjusted Games Lost, which is published by FTN Fantasy . Here is their explanation of their system: “Adjusted games lost doesn’t just add up total injuries. It accounts for both absent players and those playing at less than 100%, and it specifically measures injuries to expected starters and important situational players rather than little-used backups.”
In short, Adjusted Games Lost (AGL) tries to measure the total impact injuries have on a team. It has been widely used to evaluate injuries for well over a decade now, but unfortunately, all of their data before 2023 was on Football Outsiders, which no longer exists. I was able to use a combination of links from old Tweets and the Internet Archive to get data going back to 2018, which gives us 8 years’ worth of data ( 2018 , 2019 , 2020 , 2021 , 2022 , 2023 , 2024 , 2025 ).
Data
Over those 8 seasons, Allen had 3 different roles:
New Orleans Defensive Coordinator: 2018-21
New Orleans Head Coach: 2022-24
Chicago Defensive Coordinator: 2025
The list below shows how his teams ranked in AGL, with a lower ranking being better (1 = healthiest, 32 = most injured). For the seasons where he was a head coach, I looked at the health of the offense, defense, and overall roster, while I just showed the defense for the seasons where he was the defensive coordinator.
2018: 8th
2019: 17th
2020: 3rd
2021: 10th
2022: offense 26th, defense 14th, overall 23rd
2023: offense 16th, defense 5th, overall 7th
2024: offense 32nd, defense 10th, overall 29th
2025: 26th
Analysis
There is nothing here to suggest that injuries follow Allen. Averaging the overall rankings from his years as head coach with the defensive rankings from his years as defensive coordinator gives a value of 15.4, which is right around average for a 32-team league. Sure, he’s had years where the injuries hit hard, but he’s also had years where his teams and/or units were healthier than average.
If you only look at recent history, it’s easy to say Allen has a problem with injuries. The Bears’ defense was one of the most injured units in the NFL in 2025, and his Saints team was demolished by injuries in 2024. His 2022 Saints team was also among the 10 most injured, meaning his units have been plagued by injuries for 3 of the last 4 seasons.
But unless Allen changed something in his approach that exposed players to greater injury risk, that is just bad luck. It only looks like an Allen problem if you zoom in on a small sample and ignore the larger picture. I could just as easily have said after 2023 that Allen’s teams had been among the 10 healthiest in the league 3 of the last 4 years, so he was doing something right to help his players stay healthy.
Conclusion
In order to claim that Dennis Allen is responsible for the injury problem on Chicago’s defense, as Dan Bernstein recently did, we would first have to find that Allen’s teams have a track record of higher than normal injury rates. A closer examination of the evidence suggests that is not the case. While individual seasons have featured high injury attrition, the units under Allen’s care have had average injury luck over the last 8 seasons.
Injuries happen in football, and staying healthy is often as much a matter of luck as anything else. Allen’s teams have had poor injury luck the last 2 years, but there is nothing to suggest that it is his fault. Most importantly for Bears fans, that means there’s no reason we should expect the high injury rate of 2025 to continue.
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