The gunslingers aren’t all gone. It’s just that for the better part of a decade, the smart ones have been gunning the others down during the evolution of the NFL in an ongoing gunfight that offers a plausible explanation for the current decline of American football.
The number of superstars lining up under center has steadily been decreasing as offenses have been advancing. Teams are giving it the college try, meaning NFL professionals are embracing the run-pass-option scheme of NCAA amateurs. And it has been working. The Philadelphia Eagles ran simple plays to spectacular success becoming Super Bowl champions last year, and it has been transforming the league.
Passing is up these days, but yardage is down, observes Andrew Beaton of the Wall Street Journal. There was a time when running backs fought for the small gains on the ground and quarterbacks dazzled with the long gains in the air.
Then, things changed. Quarterbacks started throwing more. A lot more.
At the beginning of the Reagan administration and when everyone was still worried that intercontinental ballistic missiles would launch nuclear Armageddon, again as Beaton notes, the leaguewide completion percentage stood at just 56.4 percent in 1982. The next three decades witnessed a veritable rocket race at the quarterback position as teams leaned more and more on the aerial attack. This reached its zenith when Drew Brees of the New Orleans Saints completed a record 72 percent of his passes.
But this explosion in passing brought with it an increase in defensive speed. If offenses were going to get rid of the ball more often, then defenses would rush more often, decreasing the amount of time quarterbacks have to find receivers downfield. So, they throw more often, and they throw shorter passes more often. The strategy relied more on pinpointed drone strikes and less on downfield ballistic aerial assaults.
Efficiency doesn’t always equal fun for the fans, though. Gunslingers have given way to mediocre players, Beaton argues, becoming quarterback. Nick Foles of the Philadelphia Eagles, Case Keenum of the Minnesota Vikings, and Blake Bortles of the Jacksonville Jaguars are not necessarily exciting in the conventional sense. What they lack in athletic elitism, they make up for with short-yardage efficiency.
Look to Indianapolis to see a case in point this Sunday as the NFL officially opens its season. Andrew Luck will return to the pocket, but he likely won’t be dropping the bombs that made him a first round pick. With new Head Coach Frank Reich of the Philadelphia school on the sidelines, watch for Luck to make shorter and faster throws. He still has that surgically-repaired howitzer of an arm. Against the increasing speed of defenses though, he will use a stubby sidearm instead to dump off passes more quickly.
Again, this makes for more completions, but it makes for less fireworks and less ratings. Thirteen million Americans tuned in to open the 2018 season and to watch the Eagles defeat the Atlantic Falcons. It was a 13 percent drop in broadcast audience from last year. And it’s been this way for the last two seasons — coincidentally the same last two seasons when that god-among-men named Peyton Manning wasn’t playing.
It wasn’t just that Manning had a laser-rocket arm. It was also that Manning had the football mind of Rain Man. He could throw the length of the field as easily as he could dial up plays to outfox the opposition. With his hurry-up offense, The Sheriff exhausted defenses. With his otherworldly mental agility, No. 18 outsmarted them. It was good enough for four Super Bowl appearances, two championships, and records destined to stand for some time.
Without him, though, viewership has plummeted in the last two years. The NFL only managed to pull off one game with a 15.0 rating last year, as Dan Wetzel notes for Yahoo Sports. In 2015, there were 13. As Wetzel reports, with Manning on their roster, the Denver Broncos averaged an audience of 22.7 million per game.
And this is where the NFL has become a victim of its own success. In the same way that capitalist societies are perhaps doomed to destroy themselves, the NFL encouraged gunslingers to throw more and more. Eventually, they started throwing shorter and shorter when defenses started speeding up. The mediocrity Beaton describes eventually set in at the quarterback position.
The game is technically better, I guess. It’s just less exciting. Manning is gone now, the old-style gunslingers are aging, and the NFL is fading.
