I did the thing where I wrote over 5,000 words across three introductions. Here, have dessert before dinner.
We’re in a fascinating spot with the NFL right now. Defenses have gotten better, and more dynamic, and those of you who have read the past few years know the big lessons of the last few years were how they stopped playing by rules. What came to mind this week was Sean McVay’s comment in the podcast series I was so enamored with a couple offseasons ago, The Playcallers, about how defenses are not “regulated” anymore, and he’d frankly prefer a defense playing a system perfectly, because that’s when he can draw things up to beat it. Things have gotten less structured.
The goal of the shift in defensive focus was initially to prevent explosives, as the quote I pulled from that podcast series at the link above from Robert Saleh outright explains, using the boxing metaphor of taking jabs but avoiding the haymaker. In 2025, the multiyear struggle to find explosives has persisted for offenses, and when they try to push the ball, we’re seeing more and more of those interceptions where the floating, unstructured defensive backs are leaving one responsibility to go undercut some other route. I remember watching free safeties like Ed Reed try to bait quarterbacks into throws to make interceptions, and thinking that FS position was super fun. Modern defenses sometimes feel like every defensive back is a free safety. The zone defenses are hard to penetrate.
As I’m writing this, I just saw a great visual from Anthony Reinhard, who does great visual work at his Substack, The Stat Butler, about the continued decline of passing depth.
The start of 2025 has been disappointing offensively around the league. We’re seeing a lot of football games where the offenses on both sides just don’t look good. Penalties to extend drives are playing a massive role. Turnovers to give up good field position are playing a massive role. If you can get a kick return TD, or some of those late blocked FGs we saw this week, those are just massive. And it’s because offenses, collectively, just kind of suck.
Looking at some seasonal averages on Pro-Football-Reference, we’re obviously only through three games and offenses should be expected to settle in and improve, but passing yards per attempt is at the lowest rate since 2005, and rushing yards per carry is back down — last year was one of the best years in NFL history, but 2025 right now is the second-worst season since 2017. In going through projections, I talked a bit about how offensive plays per game were meaningfully down last year, at their lowest average rate since 2008. We’re down more than another full play per game leaguewide here in 2025; we’re sitting at the fewest plays per game for offenses since the 1992 season. You’re not going to be surprised that when play volume and also per-play efficiency are down, team offensive yards per game are massively down. For that one, it’s the lowest since 2005, as well.
But that stuff doesn’t do it justice, even. We’re 20 yards below last year in yards per game, and a different way to say this would be that you have to go all the way back to 2008 — right around when offenses started a transition toward using more shotgun formations, and then rules changes opened up the sport a little bit a half decade later — just to find a year within 15 yards per game of what we’re seeing in 2025.
To put numbers to that, from 2009-2024, across 16 years that spanned a significant increase in offensive output and also featured a couple down seasons where things snapped back a little bit, or injuries to key positions hurt offenses, the range of leaguewide yards per game goes from 331.6 at the bottom end (2023) to 359.0 (NFL record in 2020) at the high end, so a gap of less than 20 yards per game. The next lowest after that 2023 season is the 2017 year where the quarterback position was decimated by injury leaguewide, and the number that year was 334.1. Through three weeks here in 2025, we’re way down at 317.4.
Scoring isn’t actually way down, because penalty yards per game are right now at their second-highest rate since 1970. First downs by penalty are tying an all-time high. Percent of drives that end in a score is actually up; that’s the figure that drove the scoring rebound in 2024, where it was at the second-highest rate in league history behind only the crazy 2020 year. Right now, 2025 is up above 2024 and flirting with 2020, and that’s despite offense being way down. It’s I think a direct result of starting field position, and it’s what I tried to articulate in my July piece, “Touchdowns mattered more to fantasy in 2024, and will again in 2025.” (If you think these offensive numbers are going to rebound, I’d probably recommend having a bias to the over in betting markets in the coming weeks; however, if you don’t, the answer may be a bias to the under if the penalties level off. It’s hard to say which direction that goes, with either the yardage rising and pushing scoring higher, or the scoring falling to match the yardage.)
A result of all this, and why it means touchdowns are driving so much in fantasy right now, is that there are just not a lot of players pacing for massive yardage numbers. Last year, we saw only two players over 1,300 receiving yards, with Ja’Marr Chase and Justin Jefferson hitting the elite seasons. On the RB side, the dropoff came after four guys — you had Saquon Barkley and Derrick Henry with their massive rushing numbers, then Jahmyr Gibbs and Bijan Robinson both right around 1,900 total yards, and then a cliff, with Josh Jacobs as the only other guy over 1,600, and he had 1,671. So the top four guys were 200-300 yards out in front of the rest.
Who is smashing right now? Justin Herbert is. It’s a hilarious and pretty frustrating thing for me that a team that showed basically no statistical reason to be this far toward the pass is the one hitting at this rate. But I do still think as Omarion Hampton stacks good games, we may see things shift for these guys. The Browns have been such a different offensive with Quinshon Judkins in the game, treating him like their new Nick Chubb basically. I’m not saying that’s coming for the Chargers to the same degree, because they are obviously throwing with real intent right now, but I do still think we look back at the first weeks and think the degree of aggressiveness was in relation to having a rookie RB who hadn’t established himself yet.
Jonathan Taylor is smashing, and I’m glad I wrote in last week’s Stealing Signals that he was this year’s Barkley, and I’d take him over Barkley straight up. Puka Nacua and Jaxon Smith-Njigba are the two WRs over 300 yards through three weeks. It’s a three-game sample size where one big game will make you look great and we still don’t really have many guys looking great.
Nacua’s league-leading receiving yardage figure through three weeks this year is 20th-best over the past 10 years, looking at Weeks 1-3 each season. And I mean there are only two other guys within 82 yards of Nacua’s 333. The guy in fourth this year, Malik Nabers at 251, would be tied for 106th in the past 10 years over the first three weeks. If everything was equitable, we’d have 10 guys in the top 100 from each of the 10 years.
Rushing’s a bit different. Taylor has the seventh-most yards through three weeks in the past decade. But he’s 54 yards clear of James Cook, who would be 24th on this list. Bijan is fourth this year, and 57th across the decade, so well behind where we’d expect the fourth-strongest rushing total at this point to be.
I’m just thinking up random ways to look at this in real time; this probably isn’t the best way to make this point. But the trend is real, and clear. We appear headed in the same direction we existed in for most of 2024, where probably a few names elevate, but there aren’t a ton of elite, every-week studs.
We’re seeing great players taken completely out of games. Some of the offense has been make believe, with the penalties. There’s also stuff like Travis Etienne having a TD run against Houston where the Texans very clearly let him score. It was one of only three touchdowns on either side in that game, and the defense wasn’t trying. Houston might have had the idea top of mind because the Bucs probably let their guy, Nick Chubb, score last week. We’ve reached a point where getting a freebie touchdown is one of the saving graces to fantasy football. It’s madness.