Along with others, I think Dehere's got a good point about oversaturation. The inclusion of fantasy football also means that a large contigent of NFL fans are reviewing multiple teams every week, meaning that they catch highlights and footage which also shows off the ineptitude of most of the league.
Toe Nash said:
I think we should take a step back and examine the premise. What makes a team or games "suck"?
-Non-competitive. This one's easy -- if your team has no chance of making the playoffs, you're going to be less interested. Or if your team is being blown out in a particular game. But while this year has a stark contrast between the good and bad teams so far, last year was a lot closer as 16 teams won between 9 and 12 regular season games. That seems like a lot of solid teams. My guess is that this year is a momentary blip as a few teams rebuild and some teams like the Cowboys have injuries.
-"Sloppy" play. Players missing tackles, dropping balls, blowing assignments, either because the players are bad or they don't have enough practice time. You hear this complaint about the Thursday night games, though I feel like that may just a symptom of often having worse teams than we're used to watching on national TV (see Dehere's post above). It's also tough to tell, if a play looks sloppy, who made the mistake and whether it was really a mistake -- for example, a dropped ball could be a mistake by the receiver or it could be due to the timing being off or the ball being inaccurately thrown.
-Less balanced or un-aesthetic play. This gets to the point of the rules favoring passing and making the QB "too" important. It is hard to judge this fairly as a fan of a team with an all-time great QB, but I personally don't feel like I would be more interested if the league was full of "ground-and-pound" teams or I rooted for the 2000 Ravens who won with their defense. It's a lot easier to appreciate what goes into a great throw and catch than it is to appreciate a great block in the middle of an offensive line.
-Too many or different penalties called. If this is really a problem it seems relatively easy to fix. It should be a focus of the league to have the absolute best officiating, however.
Honestly I don't have a problem with the current game. I would like to give defensive backs a little more leeway to be physical (as Ralphwiggum suggests) but I tend to think the following:
1. I like watching good QB play and a passing-focused game more than I like to watch teams run the ball
2. I think this type of game is probably more conducive to players' long-term health than the 5 yards and a cloud of dust focus, which is good
3. I think the parity question is cyclical and we are perhaps in a weak point as some QBs age (Brees, Manning) and others aren't quite at their peak yet, leaving the teams with great QB play a good step ahead
4. Officiating needs to be better and more efficient (these lead to each other -- if the initial call is correct, there is no need to waste time reviewing it).
Great post.
In reading point #3, I had a thought. IIRC, QBs in the past decade have been more "passy" (e.g. greater total yards per game, higher raw efficiency, better EPA) than in any other decade in football (see
here for a list of articles on the topic at the old AFA site; Brian Burke has been writing about this for years). One could argue that the elite QBs of the modern era (e.g. Brady, P. Manning before 2015, Brees before 2015?, Rodgers) are not only better than earlier counterparts, but also operate in more pass happy offenses. Because QBs have become more vital (as a result of said pass happy offenses), we're seeing a greater disparity between teams.
wade boggs chicken dinner said:
The new rules encourage YAC and elite QBs can take advantage of this by "throwing their receivers open" so that they can run for extra yards. Also, the way defenses scheme for elite QBs - bringing a lot of pressure; trying exotic blitzes and coverages - leave open spaces in the defenses that allow WRs - assuming a QB can get the ball out - to run for YAC.
This suggests that the increase in YAC is due to differences in schemes, and (if you follow the links above) the biggest impact on passing performance is the increased YAC.
In any case, if the new rules have led to sharp advantages in QB efficiency, we should be able to see it by plotting QB metrics by year:
View attachment 1405
I've plotted this graph using data from
pro-football reference. I adjusted the bottom of the y axis to 2 ANY/A, to illustrate a) the "invention" of the passing game in the 40s and 50s, and b) the change in the rate of progression from year to year. We can see notable peaks at the mid-to-late 1940s, 1960s, and 1980s before we reached a steady increase from 1990 on:
View attachment 1404
Because year is ranked, I calculated the spearman's rho and squared it in order to estimate how much variance in passing efficiency can simply be explained by year-to-year progression. If the percentage is high, then rule changes may have had less of an impact. By eye, the increase in passing efficiency looks pretty linear, however, you can see the effect of rule changes from the 1950s to mid 60s and 78 to 1980. Not surprisingly, 86.4 percent of the variance in passing efficiency can be explained by year. Of course, if we examine segments covering periods before and after rule changes, this percentage may drop. For example, if we select, post-hoc, the portion between 1970 and 1980, the proportion of variance explained is 8.9 percent.
We can cherry pick this all day, so take these post-hocs with a grain of salt. However, when examining the past decade, the progression is essentially linear:
View attachment 1406
Here, simple linear progression over the years explains 95% of the variance observed in the data. Note that the difference in net efficiency is only 1 (~0.1 per year). The difference between the 50s and the 60s is twice as large (~0.2 per year), and the 1 yard difference following the 1978 rule change occured within three years (~0.3-4 per year). In other words, the effect on passing efficiency that we've seen over the past decade is a small effect.
Now, that being said. It is certainly possible that recent rule changes have
encouraged coaches to be bolder. As noted upthread, nothing hurts more than having an elite, or even average, QB get hurt. With rule changes that limit the risk of QB injury, coaches feel safer in calling plays where the QB is at higher risk for injury (i.e. when passing). Therefore, we should also examine the change in passing attempts by year. For obvious reasons, I'm ignoring the years prior to 1932:
View attachment 1407
Already we can see a problem in evaluating this chart. It might be a good idea to control for the number of attempts per year. We can do this by calculating the ratio of pass and rush attempts per year:
View attachment 1409
Here we see a pretty linear relationship as well. Specifically that passing gradually became popular throught the 1950s. There's a dip and sharp (~10 percent; ~3 percent per year) increase in the 1960s. The dropoff in the 70s, and the rule change in 1978 led to a sharp drop and increase in passing (~10 percent; ~3 percent per year). Here's the 1990's on:
View attachment 1408
Here, the relationship looks much flatter (~8 percent, 0.4 percent per year). Only 42 percent of the variance is explained here. This is do to some random variation in passing through the 1990s; 1995 shows as high as a peak as 2006. Nevertheless, there appears to be a sharper increase over the past decade:
View attachment 1410
Here, however, the relationship looks fairly linear and shallow (~4 percent, 0.4 percent per year). 92 percent of the variance is explained by linear progression of the years. Even if rule changes are having an effect, its far less than the effects observed from the 50s to the 80s, or even from 1990 to 1995. One should note that the guys in the 80s were more pass happy than the mid 60s guys, who were more pass happy than the 50s guys.
It's possible that QB importance/average quality has a nonlinear effect on observed in disparity in the league, and that the potentially small effect of recent rule changes has pushed this observed disparity dramatically. However, its far more likely that the QB position has gradually become a more important position in the NFL, due to the natural evolution of the game (e.g. via changing schemes, etc.).
EDIT: This is my interpretation of the data here. Feel free to make your interpretation if you will. However, the data are what the data are
