I’ve been pretty negative around here lately, and I apologize for that. I pride myself on being capable of finding answers, on being someone who will be able to analyze a changing dynamic quicker than most. I remember being pretty early to recognize the trend of two-deep shells and these bend-don’t-break defenses becoming a leaguewide copycat trend when I was emphasizing the drop in passing depth last regular season, and how it was hitting several quarterbacks. For a bit last year, the initial thought was it was a Patrick Mahomes thing and the Chiefs’ offense was broken, but defenses making Tyreek Hill an underneath receiver was just the tip of the iceberg.
Mahomes’ average throw depth started to fall about Week 4 or Week 5 last year, but by about Week 8 it was a trend impacting a ton of quarterbacks. This stuck out to me quickly for Mahomes, because it wasn’t just Weeks 1-3 where his aDOT was higher; that was a staple of his profile since his first starts in the league. If we go over to Next Gen Stats’ version of this stat, Mahomes was at 9.2 average intended air yards in his first year starting in 2018, then 8.6 in 2019, and 8.5 in 2020. In 2021, he was down to 7.3, and this year he sits at 7.4.
He’s not the only one. And identifying this trend isn’t particularly useful if you don’t know how to respond to it. I spend a lot of time thinking about it, but it’s a challenging question. I have to note it’s been frankly kind of nice to hear from so many others that seem lost, including some high stakes guys that I consider some of the best fantasy football players in the world. It’s been a tough fantasy season, full stop. No caveats on the types of players you like or what your approach is or what you expected; there’s just not a lot of consistency in 2022.
The NFL is always evolving, but the ways it is evolving right now are less straightforward — in how that evolution impacts the game’s statistics — than anything I’ve experienced since I’ve been analyzing this league. Here’s a little chart I made just to look at that Next Gen Stats’ intended air yards stat. I chose some pretty arbitrary cutoffs to emphasize my point, and what you’re looking at is the percentage of qualified passers who fit into each intended air yards depth bucket. For each season, there were between 38 and 41 qualified passers, and there’s an obvious caveat for 2022 that the samples are smaller (and the number of passes needed to qualify is also much lower).
What this shows is a substantial decrease in passers with higher aDOTs, and that may have started several years ago (although I suspect 2016 was a spike year). But in 2021, we see the number of passers throwing to average depths of 8.3 or more air yards substantially decrease, and more than half of the league’s passers settled into that 7.4-8.2 bucket.
This year, we’ve actually seen a rebound in the number of passers that are up over 9.2 intended air yards, relative to 2020 and 2021. On the flip side, the number that have shifted down to sub-7.4-yard levels is striking. The small 2022 sample plays a role in this, as we’d expect the range to be wider given each quarterback has thrown fewer passes, and things will naturally level out over time. So to be honest, I’m not even sure this data says anything, and I’m kind of just sharing it because it’s something I’m thinking about.
One thing that’s definitely true is scoring is down. Teams are averaging 21.6 points per game this year, after 23.0 last year, 24.8 in the wild 2020 season, and then working back from 2019 through to 2010 the prior decade was: 22.8, 23.3, 21.7, 22.8, 22.8, 22.6, 23.4, 22.8, 22.2, and 22.0. Save for 2017, every season since 2011 has been at 22.6 or more points; we’re a full point per game lower than that so far in 2022.
Yards per play is not actually down substantially, though, and turnovers have remained at 1.3 per game, which is where they were in both 2020 and 2021 after a steady decline basically through league history. A big part of why yards per play isn’t down is the rushing side — the leaguewide 4.5 yards per carry rate we currently sit at would be a record, and the next four highest figures in league history are each of the past four seasons from 2018 to 2021. The flip side is yards per pass attempt are at the lowest figure they’ve been in over a decade, coming in just under that 2017 season where scoring was also down. The issue in 2017, by the way, was a rash of QB injuries that decimated offenses like the Packers, Colts, Texans, and Cardinals, plus several other teams being in transitional periods at that key position. But yards per pass attempt have been even lower this year than that season, fractionally, and you have to go back to the dark ages of 2008 to find a season where the leaguewide average pass attempt went for fewer yards than what we’ve seen so far in 2022.
Another stat is play volume, which is down a touch, but not to insane degrees. So there are a few competing factors, but I get back to the defenses impacting passing efficiency, and how teams have responded with more short passing and then more efficient running, which naturally does shorten games and reduce play volume a bit, and it’s all not a great recipe for fantasy success.
I do wonder if there’s potential that the large spread between QBs with higher and lower passing aDOTs might actually have something to it other than just a smaller sample. My thought would be that there are still some matchups and defenses where teams can get vertical, which they obviously want to do. But the extreme low rates for some QBs indicate there are situations where it’s suddenly off the table, and we saw in a game like the Colts’ Week 6 win where that can actually play to the offense’s strength because the defense is almost certainly taking it too far.
You get this imbalance, and the potential for extreme variance week to week — it’s insane to me that three teams, the Panthers, Falcons, and Jaguars, totaled fewer than 100 total air yards in Week 6. There had only been one other such occurrence this year. Carolina had just 19 total air yards this week! There were another four teams this week that didn’t hit 150 air yards, and while there have been only 21 total games all season with 150 or fewer air yards, 12 of them came in either Week 5 or Week 6. So if you do want to look for trends, this does seem to be only getting worse.
Some of those teams with fewer than 150 air yards this week, like Philadelphia and Washington, have been up near or over 400 air yards in another game. The Jets are maybe the most hilarious example — they were at 111 air yards in Week 6 but have two games over 400 this year, both of course with Joe Flacco under center, including a 515-air-yard game in Week 3 that is the second most by any team this season. Jacksonville is another — they went from 463 air yards in Week 5 to 87 in Week 6. What is there to even say about that?
I guess one thing I should say is to put an emphasis on the importance of team air yards, in that they represent a cumulative measure of both pass depth and also pass volume, and it’s a pretty great stat that shows how many potential passing and receiving yards were there for an offense in a given week. The weeks where teams are not even at 100 or 150 air yards, you’re talking about needing tons of yards after the catch for more than one guy to have any type of productive receiving line. Maybe to even have just one. Not all of those air yards are going to be completed.
But all of these notes are really just a long way of me saying, “I don’t have answers.” I don’t know what this means for fantasy football right now. There are definitely known entities, but for a lot of the league’s offenses, it feels a bit like a random number generator on the team level to figure out if there’s even going to be sufficient volume for the players in that offense to score fantasy points.
I’m sure I could do more to understand defensive schemes and try to predict which matchups might lead to which results, and that’s the next thing I know I really need to dig into, but it’s never been my forte. I will say this — in briefly looking at air yards against right now to try to find some quick conclusions, I immediately noticed Colts’ opponents have two of those four games with fewer than 100 air yards, and they’ve both come in the past three weeks (Tennessee in Week 4 and Jacksonville this week). So as I excitedly went to check what their Week 5 opponent did to maybe have one interesting defensive trend, I found their opponent that week, Denver, set what is a season high for them with 366 air yards against the Colts that week. Sure, that game went to overtime, but it’s the 20th-highest team air yards figure this season. To summarize that, the Colts past three opponents have posted air yards totals of 90, 366, and then 87. Their Week 3 opponent, Kansas City, had their second-highest air yards figure of the season in that matchup, with 293. The Jaguars had 197 against them in Week 2, which is slightly below average, but Jacksonville won that game 24-0. Houston had 266 against the Colts in Week 1, also their second-highest figure of the season and a slightly above-average mark.
There’s no discernable pattern there, with the recent extreme lows being offset by a pretty extreme high from Denver, and three other pretty normal figures. That doesn’t mean there might not be value in digging further into the defensive stuff — I’ve even written about some stuff that’s been apparent to me just writing the column each week, like Chicago’s PROE against — but I can’t say I’m encouraged the defensive data will be easier to parse than the offensive stuff. You’re always dealing with small sample issues and the circumstances of individual games impacting numbers.
I’m sure there are great Xs and Os analysts out there breaking down the matchups and helping to explain what is happening leaguewide right now, and honestly if any of you have seen stuff to that effect, I’d love links in the comments. But as I wrote at the very beginning of this intro, I’m kind of at a loss in some ways right now. I mean, what makes the most sense to me is that the best offenses are dynamic — they can throw downfield when it’s there but they’ve found answers when it’s not. They can go to the run or short passing game, and they can move the ball down the field methodically when they have to. That’s going to create natural week-to-week variance, despite being a very logical “real football” goal and approach.
But then you look at the surprising teams, like Atlanta, and you see Arthur Smith’s run game — and remember, he came from Tennessee and those Derrick Henry-centric offenses — and it’s evident why that’s working even as I’m pretty negative about their PROE and all those things. They are basically using the threat of Kyle Pitts and Drake London to keep defenses honest and then just gashing them with a well-designed ground attack, and they are overachieving despite barely throwing.
And Marcus Mariota has played well, and he adds to their run game, too. That’s the other side of this — it’s not a huge surprise in this atmosphere that there’s this quarterback landscape we’re in, and the ones who are crushing are the elite mobility guys, Josh Allen, Lamar Jackson, and Jalen Hurts. I talked a lot this offseason about how there are varying degrees of rushing value quarterbacks provide, and those three had the clearest profiles, along with Kyler Murray and then the obvious hope for Trey Lance’s upside. Justin Fields is also providing basically the only dynamism to Chicago’s offense with his mobility. Daniel Jones has added to what the Giants have accomplished with basically no WRs. That extra layer of “How do you account for the quarterback rushing?” is something that pretty clearly isn’t solved yet by the leaguewide defensive focuses, both in terms of the QBs rushing but also how mobile QBs impact the efficiency of their RBs.