Pro Football Articles Opinion & Fantasy – Football Diner

Just extrapolate baby!
by Michael E Lawrence
16/11/2007
 
Just extrapolate baby! as Al Davis never quite said. But indeed, extrapolation the extension of statistics for the NFL season so far into sixteen games’ worth is precisely what Football Diner is about to do, for one purpose.
 
That purpose: to show the staggering extent to which the NFL is moving towards a pass first mentality as the game evolves into the 21st century.
 
Make no mistake, great runners have their place still, always will, but 2007, at least, is the year of the passer and the pass catcher. Let’s face it, when New England win the Super Bowl, they’ll be doing so primarily because of an unstoppable air attack.
 
There’s not a Rennie in the land that can prevent it.
 
First, a glance over the shoulder. You’ll remember how 2006 was the year of the running back. While ‘RBBC’ running back by committee was the offensive quirk in vogue, ’06 really belonged to LaDainian Tomlinson, who single handedly ripped defenses apart with an NFL record 31 total touchdowns and chipped in 2323 total yards while he was at it.
 
Peyton Manning’s record breaking 49 touchdown passes from two years before were a distant memory, perhaps never to be repeated, and suddenly the NFL was, once more, a run heavy institution.
 
No more.
 
With nine games played, the Diner, deciding not, after all, to watch daytime television but to do something constructive instead, converted nine weeks of individual statistics into a full season’s worth.
 
We found an undeniable pattern: a league increasingly and continually choosing the fastest way to travel, by air.
 
First up then, have a look at where the league’s top seven 2007 rushers are headed, through sixteen games at their current pace, as Football Diner gets statistical on yo’ ass:
 

 
While Peterson, as we all know, is on a tear now, quite literally, with the news a partially torn LCL will keep him out of action a short while he’s the anomaly in the trend. Fact is, 2007, based on these projections, would be the first time since 1993 that only two runners have crossed the 1,400 yard plateau in a season, when Jerome Bettis and Emmitt Smith, plucky youngsters that they were, managed it. From 2003 to 2006 alone, 29 runners crossed the 1,400 mark in the NFL.
 
Equally, no-one’s coming even close to 20 total touchdowns, let alone Tomlinson’s 2006 record.
 
So what’s happening out there? Well, unlike the Wembley game, teams are opting to pass first and run second. Or, as you might have seen in early on in Seattle Monday night, pass first, and pass second, third and fourth too.
 
Conversely, check out the extrapolated stats for 2007’s top eleven passers:
 

 
Make no mistake, these numbers mark an unprecedented shift in league-wide offensive emphasis. There are some remarkable figures in here.
 
The one that jumps out, that everybody’s been talking about?
 
Manning’s five rushing touchdowns of course. I mean, I hop quicker than he runs.
 
The figure everyone’s actually been talking about is Tom Brady’s projected 59 touchdown passes. This number would absolutely destroy, obliterate Manning’s ’04 record of 49.
 
But more than that, there are nine nine! quarterbacks well on target for 4,000 yard passing seasons. This isn’t just unprecedented, it’s completely off the scale. This many quarterbacks have never, ever in NFL history recorded 4,000 yard seasons. In fact, the previous high watermark was five, in ’06, ’04, and ’99. 2007 is on target nearly to double that figure, and may yet do it if Derek Anderson ups the pace a tad.
 
Note also how an incredible four passers are set to record at least 36 TD passes another NFL record.
 
Moreover, there are other single season marks being threatened this year.
 
Before the season, we heard how Brett Favre’s tired arm would give it one more shot, one last supplicating heave down the field. Well, as things stand, he’s on pace for 4,901 yards and might start sniffing around Dan Marino’s single season record of 5,084. That arm seems pretty sound after all. Even at his current pace, he would still register the second best passing yardage total of all time, ousting Kurt Warner’s 2001 output of 4,830.
 
Meanwhile, desperate Drew Brees, trying to turn the Saints’ season around, is looking at completing 444 passes from 659 attempts. To put it another way, he’d complete an NFL record number (previous best: Rich Gannon, 418 in 2002) out of the second most passes ever attempted (current record holder: Drew Bledsoe, 691 in 1994).
 
Lastly, the top eleven’s combined touchdown total would easily surpass any total the top 11 of any other year have collated. By light years.
 
Trust us, the NFL: passing league.
 
Inevitably, it’s the receivers who are benefitting. While Randy Moss, Braylon Edwards and TJ Houshmandzadeh are scoring in bunches, quarterbacks are tending to spread the wealth around, meaning the passing upsurge is not quite as pronounced in the receiver yardage stats.
 
Still, check out these gaudy Maddenesque projections as we move into the final third of the season, and look to see if Randy Moss can emulate Jerry Rice’s single season records for yardage and touchdowns (1848 in ’95, and 22 in ’87, respectively) as ’07 progresses:
 

 
And while we’ve said that yardage isn’t significantly up for wide receivers, it is nonetheless true that three of this year’s leading seven are on target at least to equal or surpass 18 receiving scores, only the second best total ever (currently jointly held by Sterling Sharpe in ’94 and Mark Clayton in ’84).
 
There is, and can be, no doubt about the direction NFL offenses are taking post-millennium. It’s true to say as a whole they’re outproducing previous decades anyhow and to some degree rule changes influence this evolution too but an increasing emphasis on pass is undeniable.
 
As the final seven weeks play out and as winter affects the weather we might reasonably expect greater rushing outputs, while stronger teams will have the luxury of resting starters we’ll see precisely what records are threatened.
 
Lastly, we also used extrapolation to calculate a few other key variables, and can with no small degree of confidence state that global warming is real, Michael Jackson will never again record a top ten hit, and that Bengals receiver Chris Henry will be arrested 12.46 more times in the next seven weeks.
 
You can’t argue with science.