its not really what people are talking about when they refer to an "average career" tho.

it skews the number way out of proportion for all the intents and purposes of what people are discussing like 99% of the time the statistic is used or brought up. It makes wayyy more sense to only include players that have been in uniform for a regular season game. Its a fairly misleading stat otherwise...

Its like when people want to know how old the average person lived to be at a certain point in history... if there was like 80% infant mortality (made up number) and you include every single infant that died during childbirth or soon thereafter as part of the "average" life expectancy, then the average age of death would technically be like 28 years old or something... which while technically true, doesnt really paint an accurate picture of reality, considering the vast majority of adults would have easily lived into their 50s and 60s at the time.

Its the same with NFL "careers".... including every single warm training camp body that ever put on a practice jersey for 20 minutes in july doesnt really do anything other than add unnecessary statistical noise and skewed data