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Tim Brown career statistics

In the Dante Stallworth and Marty Booker comments, I remarked on the fact that wide receivers are taking longer to develop now than they used to. The other side of that coin is that elderly wideouts, like Tim Brown here, are doing better than their geriatric counterparts from thirty years ago. In fact, the average age of the top 10 receivers from last year was 29.5, which is the oldest it's been since 1970, and I'd bet that it's the oldest it's ever been.

Here is the average age of the top 10 WRs from each year since 1970:

           avg age of
Year       top 10 WRs
---------------------
1970          26.0
1971          26.2
1972          27.6
1973          26.5
1974          27.0
1975          26.5
1976          26.6
1977          26.5
1978          26.1
1979          27.1
1980          25.9
1981          27.2
1982          28.0
1983          25.8
1984          26.6
1985          26.8
1986          26.6
1987          27.7
1988          27.4
1989          26.3
1990          26.6
1991          28.1
1992          27.5
1993          27.2
1994          28.9
1995          28.0
1996          29.3
1997          29.2
1998          27.9
1999          26.6
2000          28.4
2001          29.5

Brown's Raider running mate, 39-year-old Jerry Rice, slipped into the top 10 last year and that's the real reason that 2001 had the oldest top 10 receiving crew ever. However, the trend is very real. There are blips here and there, but the top receivers are slowly but steadily getting older and older. The same is not true, incidentally, of running backs or quarterbacks. The top 10 RBs are getting neither older nor younger. They've been holding steady (for the most part) at about 25-26. Likewise, the top 10 QBs have been about 29-30 for the last 30 years.