For the sake of argument, let’s say you go to sleep one night and wake up the next morning in 1977. It doesn’t take long to realize that you’ve walked through some sort of rift in the space-time continuum; For starters, Grandma appears to be alive and is knitting a sweater with Rocky Bleier’s face on it. The kids on the school bus are playing their handheld Mattel electronic soccer games, and the health education teacher spends much of the time before lunch denouncing the dangers of quaaludes. Insanity is in the air, except on the field, where the NFL is putting up 287.8 rushing yards per game.
And then your iPhone alarm wakes you up, because time travel isn’t real. But as you hunker down in front of the Chargers-Steelers game, you find yourself thinking that you may have inadvertently brought part of your dream world with you into 2024. That’s 3 yards and a cloud of dust. , top-notch football, and moving from one regional broadcast to the next, it becomes clear that the pass-happy offensive schemes that have ruled the NFL for the past two decades have fallen out of favor.
In their first three games under Jim Harbaugh, Justin Herbert and the Chargers virtually blew the air out of the ball. Los Angeles is currently averaging just 125.7 passing yards per game, which marks a whopping 59% decrease from last year’s 308.7. While caveats abound (Harbaugh is a running game demon and Herbert has been lame since suffering a sprained ankle in Week 2), the change in tactics is quite notable. Last season at this point, the Chargers could claim the third-most prolific passing attack in the NFL, while this year’s Bolts now find themselves on the opposite end of the spectrum at 31st.
And it’s not just a Harbaugh/Herbert issue. At 201.2 passing yards per game, the league has accumulated the least frequent flyer miles since 2003 (200.4), as passing gains have decreased 9% compared to the analogous stretch in 2023. Production, as unsurprisingly, it is also decreasing; The NFL’s average of 1.2 touchdown passes per game is the lowest since 1993.
While at least one offensive coordinator has had to tear up the playbook in the wake of a catastrophic injury to his quarterback, Miami will have to be without the services of $212.4 million man Tua Tagovailoa until at least Oct. 20. , after his latest concussion diagnosis. —Several healthy signal-callers have seen their passing stats decline in 2024. The ball simply doesn’t travel very far before hitting the receiver’s hands; So far, Patrick Mahomes has seen his average depth of throw drop to 5.2 yards per throw, down slightly from his 6.5 yards last year and significantly down from his rookie road campaign (9.1).
If Mahomes’ shorter trajectories are a function of his lack of deep threats (Tyreek Hill is gone and Travis Kelce is about to blow out 35 birthday candles), the State Farm pitcher has had to rely more and more on the pass. short as defenses continue to show him two-high coverage. And while Mahomes’ quick release amounts to a death of 1,000 cuts for the 11 guys on the other side of the line of scrimmage, the dunk-and-dunk approach has eaten into his overall gains; The defending Super Bowl champion is averaging 211.7 yards through the air compared to 275.7 last year.
Other setbacks include the Patriots, who are now last in the league with just 102 passing yards per game, down from 235.7, and the Jaguars, who have been limited to 160.7 passing yards per game, up from with 240.7 last year. period.
Among the few quarterbacks who have managed to buck the trend are Buffalo mad bomber Josh Allen and Dallas’ Dak Prescott. Unfortunately for the Cowboys and their legion of fans, Dak’s gaudy passing stats (he’s already amassed an NFL-best 851 yards) are a matter of necessity; Because Dallas can’t run the ball (averaging a meager 73.7 rushing yards per game, they are the third-worst rushing attack in the NFL), they have no choice but to let him go.
As much as the explosive growth of the passing game has coincided with the NFL’s massive gains in television broadcasts in recent years, this season’s early defensive offensive has not had a negative impact on the league’s ratings so far. Through Monday night’s double bill on ABC and ESPN, NFL games are averaging 18.6 million viewers per broadcast, a nine-year high. If flashy aerial antics are in short supply, fans have been compensated with crowd-friendly football programming in September, buoyed by three straight Chiefs appearances.
So far this season, Mahomes & Co. has generated 27.4 million impressions per outing; For comparison, the average primetime entertainment series in 2023-24 pulled in 3.38 million viewers per episode.
Until offensive coordinators find a way to counter Cover 2, fans may want to reduce their appetite for the dogfights that have characterized the last two decades of NFL Sundays. That said, the faltering passing game is now almost impossible to ignore, and the result is reflected all over the scoreboard. With just three weeks in the books, NFL defenses are now giving up a meager 21.2 points per game, down 6% from last year’s 22.5 and another 10% down from 23.6 points ago. just three years.
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