NFL’s Passing Renaissance Actually Happened 35 Years Ago
I love offense. You love offense. Everyone loves offense. And if someone says they don’t, they are lying.
We are loving in the Golden Age of Passing in the NFL. Quarterbacks are putting up numbers we’ve never seen before. Indeed, Until 2008, only one man — Dan Marino — had thrown for 5,000 yards in a season. Since then, that feat has been replicated seven times, and six in the past three seasons. Drew Brees has done it three times by himself.
So this obsession with the passing game has to be a relatively newfangled thing in the history of football, right?
Not so much.
Let’s go back in time and analyze the annual per-team-per-game averages, and you’ll see that, while we are indeed at an all-time high for passing proficiency in the NFL, this is not the most profound era for expansion of the passing game:
Note the enormous spike around 1978–1981.
What led to this? Let’s go back in history.
When the NFL began keeping rushing and passing statistics separately, running ruled the day. But passing became more in vogue in the years leading up to World War II, with teams averaging more passing yards than rushing yards for the first time in 1939.
The passing spike peaked in 1954 at 191 yards per game, when Otto Graham’s Cleveland Browns defeated Bobby Layne’s Detroit Lions 56–10 for the first time in three tries in the NFL Championship Game. It would be the first of two straight NFL titles for Paul Brown’s squad, in the middle of seven championship appearances in eight seasons. Quarterbacks like Graham, Layne, Y. A. Tittle, George Blanda (then in Chicago) and Norm Van Brocklin dominated the game, thanks to the re-adaptation of free substitution (after initially being repealed in 1946), and the ability of the offense to request a new ball at any time if it is raining. In the three-yards-in-a-cloud-of-dust pre-dome era, this must have been a great relief to quarterbacks on rainy and snowy days.
In 1956, the great defenses of the New York Giants and Chicago Bears led the way, and rushing outpaced passing for the first time in 17 seasons, but not for long. Passing peaked again in 1962 at 193.8 yards per game, but then started to decline. This was the golden age of defense, as the great defenses in L.A., Chicago, New York, and later, Green Bay, Baltimore, Minnesota and Pittsburgh ruled the day. Not even the merger with the supposedly pass-happy AFL in 1969 could temper the dominance of defense (Fun Fact: In 1970, only three of the top ten teams in passing yards per game were old AFL teams).
In 1973, teams averaged just 140.9 passing yards per game, the lowest since World War Two. The Dead Ball Era continued until 1977, when rushing again outpaced passing by two yards per game.
Then, in 1978, the NFL adopted a series of rule changes to open up the passing game:
- The Mel Bount Rule, which we know as the Illegal Contact foul, prohibited defenders from touching receivers beyond five yards from the line of scrimmage before the ball was thrown. After the ball was in the air, any contact would be pass interference.
- Not as obvious today, but just as important, pass blockers were allowed to extend their arms and open up their hands to block, impeding rushers.
- The Side Judge came into being, providing an extra set of eyes on downfield shenanigans.
That year, the Steelers defeated the Cowboys 35–31 in the highest-scoring Super Bowl to date, foreshadowing things to come.
The passing game really spiked in 1979, once everyone figured out the new rules, and passing yards per game jumped from 158.8 in 1978 to 180.4. By 1981, teams were averaging more than 200 passing yards per game for the first time in history. The trend peaked in 1989 at more than 210 yards per game, thanks to a bumper crop of Hall of Fame-level quarterbacks (Montana, Marino, Elway, Kelly, Moon) and a bunch of other pretty good ones (Cunningham, Everett, Simms, Krieg, DeBerg, White).
The defenses again figured out the secret sauce in the early 1990s, culminating in the great Eagles and Saints defenses of 1991. By 1992, we were down to 187 passing yards per game. Then came the newest rules that helped change the game forever.
In 1993:
- The Play Clock shrinks from 45 to 40 seconds
In 1994:
- The two-point conversion (The AFL’s final victory!)
- Moving the kickoff back to the 30-yard line
- Neutral zone infraction
- The defense taking over at the spot of a missed kick
Then, in 1995:
- Helmet radio communication for quarterbacks
These, combined with renewed emphasis on calling pass interference, gave us the game we know and love today.
No one loves the modern, passing-first era of football more than I do. But don’t pretend that the emphasis on the passing game is some newfangled thing, because the data tell us that it is not.
