When judging quarterback production, remember this:

[Maelstrom787]

The offensive production in the NFL since the beginning of 2020 has entered an era similar to what the Great Depression was to the American economy. Particularly for passing stats between 2022 and 2023.

Seriously. The average variety of passing stats in the league have almost overnight gone from gaudy video game numbers to Trent Dilfer level stats.

The average fan has not yet calibrated themselves with the new reality of the NFL, and that's that between 2020 and 2023, passing stats have declined by like 30%. Therefore, we as fans need to grade on a curve.

30 passing TDs in a season will become a rarity should this level of production we've seen since 2023 hold steady. 40 passing TDs in this era would be more impressive than 50 was in like 2017.

To use Geno Smith as an example - his 2023 decline from 2022 was not uncommon among other QBs. Everyone declined. The average QB was precipitously worse in 2023.

It's just harder to pass now. We're finally cycling back to a league that is going to become more run centric. Defenses, and the defensive personnel colleges are producing, have adapted to coverage.

Here's proof.

2023 was officially the worst offensive landscape in the NFL since 2006. 2006!



2020 hit a peak of offensive efficiency on a per play basis. It's fallen precipitously every year since and, if 2024 week 1 is any indication... it isn't about to get better.

We have officially regressed to the same offensive efficiency as the NFL saw in the year 2000. We have to adjust the severity with which we judge quarterbacks, receivers, and defenses accordingly.

 

[Rat]

I'm missing Russell Wilson on there. How many yards did he throw for?

 

[Maelstrom787]

I missing Russell Wilson on there. How many yards did he throw for?

He visualized himself throwing at least 300 in his pretend time warmups.

 

[Ozzy]

Early season stuff is always weird too. Geno wasn’t great today but settled down and also made the plays he needed to to win. First time with new OC and a beat up line. I’ll take it.

 

[kidhawk]

First week numbers are often lower because starters on offense don’t get much time together in game situations in the preseason. I’m not shocked at all

I was happy to see our OC didn’t abandon the run just because we were behind by a few points. So many times last season I screamed at my tv for them to just run the ball more.

 

[Maelstrom787]

But this is *abnormally* bad.

Seriously. Check out week 1 passing stats last year.



NFL passing attacks are in crisis and they've been trending this way since 2020. 2024 is already looking to continue the trend. We're at like 185 passing yards average for week 1 right now.

I don't expect it to end up being better than 2023, which was worse than 2022, which was worse than 2021, which was worse than 2020.

To be clear, I prefer this! I like that the league is trending this way. Defenses are responding and real football is going to start looking less like Madden and more like classic gridiron battles of attrition. That's my brand of ball.

My concern is that we still aren't calibrated as a fanbase with the reality of offensive numbers decreasing so precipitously over the past few years. The common narrative among NFL fans is that defense is dying and offensive numbers are exploding, leading to fans having unrealistic expectations for players.

Just trying to spread awareness to inform future discussions. Many aren't aware of how severe the recession of offensive production has been.

30 TDs is something that only the top 10% of passers will be able to achieve if the trend holds. Only 4 did it in 2023, with 36 passing TDs being the highest in the league.

Many will think that 30 TDs is a mark that is still achievable by common quarterbacks on average teams, and that 275 passing yards average per game is a realistic mark (would be 4675 passing yards, good for #1 in the league in 2023 and shaping up to be even further out of range this year).

In reality, at the current rate, 30 TDs and 270 passing yards per game are about to be numbers that can win a player an MVP award.

Geno's 2022 season, at the current rate in which league-wide passing stats are progressing since 2020, would be a serious MVP contender in a 2024. That's how rapidly the landscape is changing.

 

[Maelstrom787]

I wonder how much of it is just offensive lines being worse on average than they used to be, honestly.

I mean, we saw it today. Geno didn't have time to do crap when it came to plays developing downfield. Nix did, but that was because Seattle looked like they were mush rushing him to keep him in the pocket and force him into making mistakes through the air rather than forcing him outside the pocket, where traditionally he has been better.

Running at these teams is one of the only ways to stifle that rush a bit.

This could be a league-wide predicament. You've heard NFL OL coaches complain over and over about the lack of quality OL coming out of college programs and the need to re-educate them from the ground up.

Are a combination of dominant front 7s and worsening OL play the main culprit behind the vanishing proficiency of NFL air games?

 

[rcaido]

Geno had the third least amount of TDs by a starter that played at least 15 games.

 

[Maelstrom787]

Geno had the third least amount of TDs by a starter that played at least 15 games.

Out of the quarterbacks that played 15 games or less, he had the fourth highest amount of touchdowns.

See how stats can sound really good when I want to be a total shyster about how I present them?

I try not to do that, because points of view that I find I have to muddle stats to defend are a dead giveaway to me that my point of view is bullshit, therefore I correct myself with a review of the entirety of the available information. I do this because I respect truth too much to delude myself with propaganda of my own creation.

So, let's get down to an unbiased presentation of the information. I'll make your point for you. If you want to make your point without having to engage in the doublespeaking typical of politicians, TD% is a better metric to use than volume stats. Counts pass attempts, not games.

Geno's TD% was quite pedestrian. 4.0%. If looking at team passing stats, this puts Seattle 17th out of 32 teams (team view is a little easier to use, and actually penalizes Geno because Drew Lock's TD% was worse at 3.9%) so yeah, not great.

That's an objective statistic that does not need to be presented in a way that obscures critical information, like how you're including mostly guys who played either 1 or 2 games more than Geno in the ranking to make him third lowest, which sounds a lot worse than "Geno Smith quarterbacked a slightly below average passing offense in terms of touchdowns scored against the number of pass attempts they made" which is a fact.

Short. Sweet. To the point. No obfuscation, no misleading, no bullshit. Straight up "that's the percentage of their passing attempts that were touchdowns."

Now, if I wanted to beat a dead horse to someone I know won't read it or mentally engage with it, I could point out other objective factors like how:

• Seattle's rushing offense had the 28th most yards and the 31st most attempts in the NFL in 2023
• Seattle had the 9th highest percentage of dropped passes in 2023
• Seattle's OL allowed the most hurries in the league in 2023 despite being blitzed the 10th least
• Seattle's defense sucked absolute unwashed salty donkey balls in almost every regard

And then I could point out how:

• Geno Smith turned that absurd amount of hurries into a top-10 lowest sack rate in the NFL among QBs who started most of the season
• Geno Smith threw for just slightly below average touchdown efficiency while being hurried more than anyone else in the NFL
• Not only that, but defenses also blitzed the 10th least against us. So most hurries + 7/8 in coverage simultaneously. You know... probably the hardest situation for any starting quarterback in the entire league to be placed into.
• Despite this, he broke that game winning touchdown record, had a high success rate in the passing game, pushed the ball downfield further than the average QB, and notched an above-.500 record for a team that performed abysmally in almost every single facet unrelated to the passing offense he led.

So, with that out of the way, I guess we can get back to the actual topic, which is the paradigm shift required to align expectations for quarterbacks league-wide with the reality of declining passing success in the NFL.

 

[BASF]

The offensive line problem, I would say is the biggest culprit. Also, the NFL player's association forcing lack of practice makes it more difficult for teams offense to be as in synch as they used to be. Also, the rise of the running backs playing QB makes it harder for QBs who are pocket passers and can dissect defenses to be able to win jobs at the college level to hone their craft.

 

[knownone]

It's week one. Given that most of these offenses hardly played in the preseason, a slow start feels somewhat expected. It'll be interesting to see whether that EPA trend continues, though. Defenses seem to have finally neutralized the Mcvay/Shanahan offenses.

It's also worth noting that total yards have minimal relation with EPA. For example, Tua was 1st in passing yards, but Josh Allen's EPA—despite having about 100 fewer yards—was 2.5x higher. Tua was 12th in EPA. Our boy Geno? 7th. He quietly had a very efficient game, and when the dust settles, he will grade out as one of the best quarterbacks this week by most metrics.

 

[seabowl]

Maybe having starters play so little in the preseason can hurt the production at the start of a seasoning? Just a thought.

 

[sutz]

It's a cycle. For the first 20 years of the century, teams got more and more pass happy.

Defenses started to counter by putting more smaller, faster pass coverage players out there. The 4-3 traditional front 7 has evolved into 3 and even 2 man lines with 4-5 LB/pass rushers called "edge" players that stand on the end of the line, but don't have their hand in the ground. 5 DBs (nickel formation) is almost the norm now, and 6 or 7 is called situationally.

You counter smaller and faster with bigger and stronger. Offenses start to run the ball more, forcing lighter DBs to come down in the box and take on OL and TE blockers to tackle RBs that are as big or bigger than they are.

I also like that running games are getting more sophisticated and more prolific. Big problem though, is that colleges have not been putting out OL players that do that with the proliferation of spread offenses around the NCAA.