The NFL Doesn't Suck

We are through the first seven weeks of the NFL season, and it is reasonable to start looking at some of the trends emerging. An emergence of young talent has pushed the NFC East to the top of the league, while the AFC South continues to occupy the basin. Matt Ryan and Matthew Stafford are playing as well as any quarterbacks in the league, after many had given up on them developing into true stars. And every good team seems incredibly lopsided, with barren defensive teams like Pittsburgh, Oakland, and Atlanta battling with inept offenses like Minnesota, Seattle, and Philadelphia.

But the one trend that has gotten the most attention has nothing to do with any specific team. Seven weeks into the season, the most common refrain is that play across the league is at an incredibly low level. The NFL is putting out a thoroughly mediocre product on a weekly basis, and it is dragging down the ratings and possibly doing serious harm to the future of the sport.

There are a lot of opinions on why quality is down. The most recent CBA limited practice time, leading to sloppy play. The league has cracked down on any sort of celebration, leading to too many penalties. The rules are difficult to understand, and the pace of the game is unbearable, burdened by countless stoppages to study in slow motion ambiguous moments of the game.

There is a lot of debate about what the cause of the problem is, but few people seem to be arguing that there is a problem. Every major game comes with new complaints of miserable play, reaching its apex with the 6-6 tie this past Sunday between Arizona and Seattle. A marquee matchup of two of the league’s top teams, this game saw no touchdowns and two missed chip shot field goals in the final minutes of overtime.

The conclusion of this game led to even more shouting about the declining quality. But the truth is, most of it is off base. The missed field goals were bizarre and unexplainable, but for the first 70 minutes of play, this was actually one hell of a football game.

There are plenty of examples of bad football games out there. I’ve been to bad football games myself. And at times this year, I’ve even agreed that a game has been unpleasant to watch. The second Monday night game of opening week that saw the 49ers shut out the Rams was a miserable game. The prime time matchup between Carolina and Tampa Bay was sloppy and unpleasant. There is bad football out there, but this past Sunday’s game was not an example of this.

Low scoring games can be awful when the offense is failing due to its own ineptitude. And for half this game, that was largely the case. Arizona’s defense played fantastic, but Seattle’s offense is a mess right now, and it was difficult to watch that side of the ball. On the other side however, we witnessed some incredible football from start to finish.

Arizona’s offense actually moved the ball throughout the game, and it was only incredible work by Seattle’s defense that held them to just a field goal. They made a crucial fourth down stop deep in the red zone. Bobby Wagner made a sensational play to hurdle the long snapper to block a field goal. This was truly the case of an efficient offense facing a supreme defense, and it was a hell of a lot of fun to watch.

Of course, this is only one game, and while we can disagree about how enjoyable it was, this doesn’t prove anything about the overall quality of the games. To do this, we need to take a broader view, looking at some of the common trademarks of sloppy, incompetent football.

Below I’ve put together a table of some of these statistics. In the first column I list the averages of each category from 2006 through 2015. Beside these I’ve placed the numbers so far from 2016 to give us some idea of how this year has looked in comparison to the recent past.

	Average	2016
Penalties/Game	12.3	14.0
First Downs/Game	38.5	40.6
3rd Down %	39%	40%
Turnovers/Game	3.2	2.8
Punts/Game	9.5	9.0
FG%	83%	84%
Yards/Game	678	711
Points/Game	44.3	45.5
ANY/A	5.8	6.4
Completion %	61%	64%

A few things are immediately obvious from this table. Offense is clearly at a much higher level than it’s been over the past ten years. Quarterbacks are playing better, with higher completion percentage and ANY/A. Offenses are gaining more yards, more first downs, and scoring more points. They are punting less frequently, converting more third downs, and turning the ball over fewer times each game.

Does any of that sound like a lower level of play?

Admittedly, offense has been trending up for the past decade, so it isn’t surprising that the averages would be lower than the current numbers. So it might be better to chart these numbers to see if we can spot a significant deviation from this trend.

(For the ease of charting, I’ve adjusted every stat so that 100 corresponds with the average in the table above. I also inverted the turnovers and punts series so an increase would show up as a decline in the graph.)

The positive trend in offensive production is very clear from this chart. What’s also clear is that 2016 hasn’t reversed that trend. Quarterback efficiency is higher than it has ever been. We’re seeing the fewest punts since 2008, and the fewest turnovers of any year. The only example of clear decline from a year ago is field goal percentage, and even that is still higher than at almost any other point in history.

The one example where it appears things have gotten worse is penalties. There is more than a full penalty extra per game over the average, and it certainly has seemed like the flags have been coming out a little too aggressively this year. But when we plot the series of penalties per game over time, we get a slightly different picture.

Penalties are up from a year ago, but when compared to the trend this doesn’t look that bad. There are fewer penalties now than there were in 2005, and only 0.15 more penalties than a year ago. This difference is trivial, and anyone who tells you that two extra penalties for every week of play has severely impacted their ability to enjoy football is a liar.

So why is this the overwhelming narrative of 2016? Surely we aren’t all just imagining that the games have been worse. There has to be some explanation for this almost universal belief.

One possibility is that the games that have received the most attention have been the worst. And it certainly has seemed like the prime time games have been bad. Even if you discount last Sunday’s game, there have been some pretty miserable matchups. We’ve seen the 49ers twice, the Bears twice, and the Texans three times. I’m sure if we plotted those numbers for just the prime time games we’d see a notable difference.

	Average	2016	Prime Time
Penalties/Game	12.3	14.0	13.4
First Downs/Game	38.5	40.6	39.5
3rd Down %	39%	40%	39%
Turnovers/Game	3.2	2.8	2.7
Punts/Game	9.5	9.0	10.0
FG%	83%	84%	84%
Yards/Game	678	711	661
Points/Game	44.3	45.5	41.1
ANY/A	5.8	6.4	5.7
Completion %	61%	64%	64%

Is there something there? Maybe a little. Quarterback play has definitely been worse, and offense on the whole seems diminished from the rest of 2016. But even so, the numbers aren’t that far out of whack from the averages over the past ten seasons. The prime time games have been lower quality than the rest of the season, but to claim they’ve been the worst football the league has ever seen is just ignorant.

The truth is, the quality of football has been just fine this year. There have been some bad games, and these isolated incidents have driven the narrative. Because once we start talking about bad football, that’s all we are able to see. There are bad plays in every game, just as there are great plays in every game, and unfortunately this year the stories we’ve been telling ourselves have been more about the former than the latter.

We talk about how terrible Case Keenum was in the London game between the Giants and the Rams, forgetting the incredible individual effort by Landon Collins on his pick-six. We talk about the shanked field goals in overtime of the Seahawks-Cardinals game, rather than the spectacular block by Wagner. Games become an exercise in confirmation bias, and with more than a hundred plays in every game there are plenty of opportunities for us to pick them apart and complain.

There are ten weeks left in the NFL season, followed by four weeks of playoffs. There is a lot more football ahead, and it’s up to us to decide how we’ll enjoy it. And in the end I can only speak for myself, but I personally find more pleasure in appreciating the great moments of the game than complaining about the bad.