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Saturday, January 09, 2010

Golden Age of Offense

Yeah, it's football so maybe it shouldn't be on here, but is anyone going to return to the yahoo board ever again? I went to admire the additions to my trophy case, and saw mcard's post about Fred Jackson and the bumper crop of all-purpose yard machines this season. It struck me that NFL offenses have been out of control, especially QBs. 4,000 yards doesn't seem like any big deal and I just found this link to confirm my suspicion:
http://www.profootballhof.com/history/release.aspx?release_id=1330

A new record: ten different QBs went over 4,000. The previous two records, seven and six QBs, were set in 2007 and 2008, respectively.

In terms of total yards, average for the top 15 teams, and number over 6,000 yards, 2002-2009
2002: 5778, 4
2003: 5577, 1
2004: 5809, 5
2005: 5573, 1
2006: 5615, 3
2007: 5680, 1
2008: 5764, 3
2009: 5919, 6

Average total points, top 15 teams, and number over 450, 1999-2009
1999: 387, 1
2000: 393, 3
2001: 368, 1
2002: 398, 2
2003: 398, 1
2004: 403, 2
2005: 391, 1
2006: 387, 1
2007: 415, 3
2008: 407, 1
2009: 412, 4

1984: 396, 2 (Marino's insane year)


Be good to do this for all the teams (to see if maybe the top fifteen are just taking on a bigger share) and take it back a lot further than ten years, but it seems offense is on an uptick. This might help explain why there was so much parity in our fantasy football league this season; with a lot more points and yards to go around, the talent pool was a bit deeper than some other years. That's my hypothesis for now.

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