I kind of like the thing in Part 2 where I hit on good questions about Part 1’s introduction, and we have another one from yesterday’s intro. Nick asks:
A couple of questions so that I feel more on the same wavelength:
1. You mentioned a league-wide shift in the way offenses have been operating. Apologies if you've discussed this before but is this about passing being down (both in raw production and playcalling/scheme)?
2. Kupp comes up as a reference point for Jacobs in the sense of a player reaching a new level. As you noted, it's statistically improbable to find the next breakout of this type. But do you have any thoughts on whether this shifts the window of expected outcomes significantly for Jacobs next year (similar to Kupp pre-injury)?
I have written about Question 1. a bit, but for anyone who wanted similar clarification, it’s about passing being down, yes. There’s also some schematic stuff with the heavy shift to two deep taking away deep passing and forcing offenses to move slowly down the field, which I’ve written about a few different times, dating to last year. Passing aDOTs are down, as well as passing volume. Total air yards is probably the best way to represent it, but we don’t have air yards data going back forever. But air yards are a representation of potential receiving yards, essentially, and total air yards have to be way down in 2022 relative to the past few seasons and I think you’d find 2022 is the lowest air yards season of the past decade.
I didn’t mention this explicitly, but when I was talking about Atlanta, the simplest way to articulate the point for them is raw pass attempts. They have thrown a bit more recently, but are only up to 23 pass attempts per game. Since 1990, the only team to average fewer over a full season was the 2004 Steelers (22.4). And then even despite that, Atlanta isn’t even last in the league this year, Chicago is at 21.2. You have to go back to that 1990 season to find a team who averaged fewer over a full year, as the Raiders that year were at 21.0. And since this has sent me down a bit of a rabbit hole, I went back even further, and in fact you have to go back to 1982 to find another team that was that low in pass attempts per game, and 1982 was a strike-shortened season so it’s a nine-game sample, and still only one team that year (Patriots) was lower than the 2022 Bears in pass attempts per game. Going back even further, it’s the 1977 season where you get another team below the Bears’ 21.2 figure.
Stating this in clearer terms: Since 1977, only the 1990 Raiders averaged fewer pass attempts per game in a non-strike-shortened season than the 2022 Bears are averaging through 12 games this year.
We’re talking about a ton of changes from that era of NFL football and how it was played, up to now. When you dip back into the ‘70s, offensive football was played different where it was very run heavy and then passing was primarily deep shots, and wide receivers of the era had extremely high yards per reception figures by today’s standards, and interceptions were far more common despite fewer total passes. This was the genius of Bill Walsh’s West Coast offense that proved the viability of a short passing game, instead of just running all the time and occasionally chucking it deep.
The way the sport is played has shifted immeasurably since then, due to various rules changes meant to make passing easier, formational stuff like the increased popularity of the shotgun formation (which has exploded just since the 1990s), and a ton more reasons. This page at Pro-Football-Reference shows league-wide per-game averages and you can see how attempts, yards, touchdowns, interceptions, and more have evolved (keep in mind small shifts are still pretty massive given the size of the sample is tens of thousands of plays each year).
The point I’m trying to make is Chicago’s pass volume being this low, in 2022, is an insane result, something I couldn’t have possibly fathomed. And the same goes for Atlanta, but that furthers the point — Atlanta’s figure isn’t even last in the league this year. So when you look at Atlanta, you have a team being one of the run-heaviest in the league (which was a known risk) in a season where the entire range of how many pass attempts are even possible or could be expected has shifted down substantially (which has created an unknowable result).
And when I say substantially, let me further emphasize by saying I’ve compared to results in 1990 and earlier, but if we just look at individual seasons since 2010, no team has thrown fewer passes per game than the 2012 Seahawks at 25.3. These numbers like this Seahawks team and the 1990 Raiders are the outliers. Since 2010, in those 12 seasons, there have only been 11 teams that have averaged fewer than 28 pass attempts per game, and seven of those seasons are basically repeats, with the Colin Kaepernick 49ers era popping up twice, the first two years of Lamar Jackson starting both popping up for the Ravens, and then three instances of the Seahawks in the Russell Wilson era showing up, including his first two years. You also have a Marcus Mariota Titans season in there, interestingly, as well as a Tim Tebow Broncos season, Robert Griffin’s rookie year in Washington, and the 2020 Patriots who were largely led by Cam Newton. So it’s mobile quarterbacks, obviously.
But even given that Mariota is a QB who has been on this extreme low pass volume list, and Justin Fields would make sense to fit in this group as an early-career mobile QB, we’re talking about a little less than one team per season that gets down below 28 pass attempts per game, and then down around 25 would be an extreme outlier and the lowest expectation I would have gotten to in the modern era. And Atlanta is at 23.0 right now and Chicago is at 21.2. Tennessee is also right at 25.0 here in 2022, and then Carolina is at 28.0, and the Giants, Eagles, and Ravens are all between 29.0 and 29.3. So it’s not just two teams; they are just the best examples. And again, that’s just a really simple example (pass attempts) but there’s more with aDOTs, etc., and it’s why I think something like total air yards would maybe represent this league-wide shift even better.
And before I move onto the second question, I just want to say that if you’re curious about the “why,” my understanding is it’s all about the decisions teams have to make regarding the looks they are facing, and that defenses are very comfortable showing looks that offenses are trained to decide are run looks, and even if a pass play has been called, that they kill the play and run against the light box they are seeing. And we are seeing an NFL season with the highest yards per carry of all time — rushing has never been this efficient, and that in my opinion is pretty obviously because defenses have never been less interested in trying to shut that element of offenses down (as well as the greatest generation of QB mobility the league has seen).
But it’s more or less the end result of an analytics movement that proved passing is more efficient; the defenses figured it out, too. The next step as I see it is offenses changing their decisions and being more willing to throw even against pass looks. There are still efficient passing games due to elite QBs (e.g. Chiefs) and also scheme (e.g. the ways the Dolphins have utilized space, which isn’t meant to be a knock on Tua Tagovailoa but I’ve written about things Mike McDaniel has done like attacking the deep middle, and he’s shown it’s not hopeless and good enough passing-game designers can still win in the modern NFL).