There were over 11,000 players drafted from 1970 to 2018. You might think that those players were evenly distributed in terms of what day of the week they were born. For example, 1 out of every 6.9 were born on Monday, which is pretty close to what you would get by random chance. And 1 out of every 6.9 players were born on Tuesdays and Saturdays, respectively, too. In between those days, 1 out of every 6.7 or 6.8 NFL players were born on a Wednesday, Thursday, or Friday. All pretty even, until we get to the day dominated by pro football: only one out of every 8.2 NFL babies were born on a Sunday.

The graph below shows, for all NFL players drafted from ’70 to ’18 on whom I have birth data (generally those who actually made it to the NFL), how many were born on each day. As you can see, Sunday is a huge outlier.

This, however, is not necessarily surprising. Sunday is the day of the week where the fewest babies are born, as hospitals rarely induce or schedule a Cesarean delivery on a Sunday.

This trend, I believe, is more common now than it used to be. Which made me wonder: is the rate of Sunday babies entering the NFL decreasing? It turns out, yes it is.

In the 1970 Draft, 1 in every 7.0 babies were born on a Sunday. In 1972, it was 1 in 6.2, and in the 1990 Draft, it was also 1 in 6.2. As recently as 1998, it was 1 in every 6.8 draftees were born on a Sunday. This, of course, corresponds to players born in the late ’70s. But beginning with drafts starting in 2000, that rate has ticked up significantly, perhaps indicating that nationwide, babies born in the ’80s and later tended not to be born on Sundays. Take a look at the graph below, which shows the number of 1 in X NFL draftees were born on Sundays, from the 1970 Draft to the 2018 Draft:

In the 2015 Draft, just 17 of the 250 draftees on whom I have draft data — or 1 in every 14.7 players — were born on Sunday.

Anyway, there’s no big takeaway from today other than I thought this was pretty interesting, and figured you guys might find it neat, too.