Stealing Signals, Week 8, Part 1

Teams are scoring more points than their yardage implies, and the impact on fantasy

One of the things I’ve been most proud of over the past half decade at this newsletter is our discussions of the macro evolution of the league’s schemes and strategies. Probably more than most, I think that broad stuff should really impact the micro decisions, and how you play fantasy.

The decisions I make basically all come down to seeking this year’s biggest breakouts, that will beat ADP by the largest amounts. I’ve talked every way I know how about that being how you win. And to find those guys, I frame that stuff on the team level. But to figure out which offenses could bubble up and greatly exceed expectations, you do need to keep the macro stuff centered, including what teams set up well to thrive in the meta of a given season, and which are structured such that even if they do surprise, it probably won’t happen in a fantasy-friendly way.

I’m going to talk about the Colts a lot in this introduction, but it’s not just Jonathan Taylor but also Tyler Warren as a second legitimate league-winner, and then even Michael Pittman as a third really pretty valuable piece. Daniel Jones is like QB5 overall. So much of the ways these guys are hitting gets elevated by the whole offense being as good as it is; they’d still be good if the Colts themselves weren’t quite this good, but if it wasn’t all coming together to make them the surprise No. 1 scoring offense at this stage of the year, the pie would be smaller and the collective impact wouldn’t be the same. Maybe Taylor would still be unstoppable, but someone would then have to be a little bit left behind.

You don’t bat 1.000 on trying to predict this team-level stuff, but contemplating it does matter. And I try to lean into those takes, and make sure I’m providing whatever info I can on macro changes, even if some major shifts aren’t staring me in the face. The stuff that happened with QB aDOTs starting to fall in 2021, and how I wrote about that in-season, and then how that foreshadowed the leaguewide shift in defensive focus and leaguewide scoring falling in 2022 and 2023, and all those elements we’ve covered here I’d argue as well as “real football” reporters — those were all things that came to me organically, and I felt the need to write about them because they were fascinating, mostly. But this year, when I didn’t have some big thing, I still sort of forced myself to churn out a post that was the closest thing I could think.

I’ve referenced that post a few times recently, called “Touchdowns mattered more to fantasy in 2024, and will again in 2025.” My hook, the opening line, was: “Hopefully a quicker post today…” I didn’t want to spend a ton of time on it, and didn’t think it really warranted a massive discussion. But because these things have been pretty interesting over the past several years, I wanted to get it out there, and talk about these trends and just have it top of mind.

And it’s been fascinating to watch how that stuff has played out during the first half of the season. As I write these game-by-game breakdowns every week, and I’ve done it for nearly a decade now, the striking thing to me in 2025 is how team points no longer require as many team yards. That’s very directly what fantasy football is all about — yards and touchdowns — and what I’m saying is that in 2025, the way those two things interact has just been significantly different.

I’ll get to some of the data, but the why is perhaps more interesting, and there are several reasons I think this has occurred. First is obviously field position, which we’ve talked about. The new kickoffs, and special teams in general, are playing a massive role. Second is the way explosive plays have been in decline, as defenses key on them, which take away big yardage chunks, but also slow down drives in terms of time and plays required to move the length of the field, which leaguewide reduces the number of overall drives.

The third thing is that analytics have shifted the cost/benefit decisions head coaches make, where they used to punt to delay a loss, and keep the final score close, but football fans are way more aware of how that strategy reduces win percentage, such that the current cost/benefit just from a public relations standpoint, and what the media is going to ask you about after the game, pushes you in the direction that if you’re going to get beaten, you better go down swinging. You better be going for it on every fourth down, and getting blown out. In 2025, if you’re not losing by 20+, you’re not trying.

Atlanta was the culprit this week, where after a long Jaylen Waddle TD in the third quarter pushed the game to 24-3, the Falcons went for it from their own 41 on the next drive, and then from their own 35 on the drive after that, setting up Miami with two more short-field scores that in some ways turned Waddle’s TD into one that didn’t just extend the game from 17-3 up another touchdown, but from 17-3 to 34-3 in short order. Miami winds up with a blowout win where they put up 34 points but with a solid-yet-unspectacular 338 total yards.

A fourth thing that also moves in this direction is defensive penalties, and long defensive pass interference penalties, and roughing the passer, and all these things that create automatic first downs and give up 15 yards or more, that increase scoring probability on a drive without the offense actually gaining yards from scrimmage. If you already have better field position and shorter drives, then penalties cut out what needs to be gained that much more.

I checked on some of these things a few weeks back, but let’s talk about the leaguewide trends a little bit. I’ll start with penalties and kind of work backward — in 2025, teams are averaging 2.1 first downs by penalty per game, which ties 2019 for the most all time. Last year, that number was 1.7. The 7.0 accepted penalties per game, and 55.8 penalty yards per game, are both the highest figures for at least five years (for the 7.0 penalties number, it’s the highest since 2005).

As I’ve talked about, and predicted during my projections process, the play volume decline in 2024 wasn’t an outlier but has continued into 2025. Leaguewide, we’ve sat at 63+ plays per game basically every year since 2008 (I say basically, because a couple years dropped to 62.9, but no lower). When I say something goes back to 2008, or 2005, you have to realize that wasn’t just an entirely different era in terms of strategies, but also rules. One of the points is even mundane stuff like timing rules impact this stuff, and all of that stuff changes over decades. Anyway, 63 team plays per game has basically been the floor for decades, and a few years got up over 64.

Then in 2024, we were down to 62.2, the first year that low since 2008. Right now in 2025, we’re down to 61.1. The last time we were lower in terms of plays per game was 1992, but in 1992, the average team scored 18.7 points per game. That number had steadily increased for years, and in 2025 it’s at 23.3. I’ll get back to that in a second.

Yardage is also down from recent years, and because yards per play is actually pretty consistent, that can largely be chalked up to the decrease in plays. At 328.7 yards per team game, we’re down substantially from last year’s 337.4, and at the lowest figure for the NFL leaguewide since 2008.

Drives remain down. Teams average 10.4 drives per game, down from 10.7 last year and 11.1 the year prior. As I wrote this offseason, the 10.7 last year was the lowest since 1998, when Pro-Football-Reference first has drive data. So now we’ve set a new low for how many drives the average team gets.

So plays are down, drives are down, yards are down, and slightly offsetting that we do have first downs by penalty up, though penalty yardage is one of the few stats that actually isn’t some major outlier (i.e. it’s penalties, and first downs by penalty, but not the actual yardage necessarily; the yardage is up over the past half decade, but every season from 2015-2019 had more penalty yardage than 2025, so it’s basically the median of the past decade, despite again having the most penalties and first downs off of them).

So anyway, 2025 is this weird year in so many ways, and then the kicker in all of this is points are up. Scoring has increased! Fewer plays, yards, drives, etc., and yet we’ve risen to 23.3 points per game, the most since the outlier 2020 pandemic year with no fans, and when you set that crazy year aside, 23.3 is 0.1 away from the next highest scoring season in NFL history (2013, which was 23.4).

These are all leaguewide numbers, but what I’m saying about fantasy football is less defined. Someone could probably research it in interesting ways and present it better than I am, but just purely off the vibes of me watching the NFL and writing about the box scores for all these years, 2025 is insane. It’s insane how many points some of these teams are scoring relative to how much they are actually filling up the box scores with stats (and frankly how well they are actually playing on offense when I watch). It doesn’t require good offense to score points right now. When you do have good offense, you’ll score a million.

As I mentioned, the Colts have one of the best offenses in football right now, built around misdirection and being multiple and finding a variety of ways to get the ball to playmakers in high-success-rate ways so you can matriculate the ball down the field in the ways modern defenses are forcing you to, until of course you’ve made it so difficult on the defenses that they have to start taking some chances and you also have the most electric player in the sport right now and he’ll go ahead and just house one from 80. But the structure is not the big plays; it’s the consistency and the variability of ways they can attack you on any down. And they just score every drive. When a defense like Tennessee’s makes them punt twice in their first eight drives, and kick a field goal once, it’s the punts and the field goal that feel like the surprise, not the five touchdowns. They feel like they are inevitable to score, every time.

What was fascinating about this week for them, was how in the Chargers’ game last week, they needed to be more efficient on third downs, and even convert some fourth downs. And they got those key downs and made it work and put up 38 points. You’re still going to need to do that sometimes, when needed, and then sometimes you won’t even get those key downs and that will be a problem. But what was fascinating about this week for them was they scored 38 again this week and had just three third-down conversions all game. They didn’t get into third downs! For the good offenses like the Colts, sometimes you aren’t even going to need third down much.