No sports entity markets itself quite like the NFL. The shots of rabid fans idolizing legends in the making, the countless hours of pregame buildup, the wild popularity of fantasy football, the alternate broadcasts, the push to grow internationally. For most of the last two decades, no league has fed its marketing department as much red meat as the NFL. But when it comes to the on-field product, this season has been pedestrian from an offensive standpoint and especially putrid when it comes to quarterback play.
Tom Brady, who was part of more than a few marquee matchups in his 23-year NFL career, blasted the state of football on ESPN uberpundit Stephen A Smith’s radio show earlier this week.
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“I don’t see the excellence that I saw in the past,” Brady said. “I think the coaching isn’t as good as it was. I don’t think the development of young players is as good as it was. I don’t think the schemes are as good as they were.”
Harsh words by Brady but he’s not entirely wrong, particularly about the lack of player development. Many of the young quarterbacks thrust into the spotlight are replacing a wave of future Hall of Famers who have retired or aged out in the past few years. In addition to Brady, we’ve bid adieu to Ben Roethlisberger, Drew Brees and Philip Rivers. And yes, we can throw Matt Ryan in there, too. Some succession plans have worked out better than others – like Justin Herbert when his receivers decide to catch the ball and his coach isn’t mucking up the game management – but most of them have not. Thanks to the rookie wage scale, teams are increasingly rolling with unprepared quarterbacks while they dole out their salary cap dollars elsewhere, copycatting a formula deployed to perfection by teams like the Kansas City Chiefs with Patrick Mahomes, Philadelphia Eagles with Jalen Hurts and the San Francisco 49ers with Brock Purdy.
An unprecedented 10 first-year quarterbacks have started games this season, breaking the previous record of nine set in 2019. Of those 10, the Houston Texans’ CJ Stroud is the only one worth watching on a weekly basis, having shown himself to be a shrewd playmaker. It’s easy to get excited about undrafted rookie Tommy DeVito, the New York Giants’ understudy who lives at home, notching an improbable win over the Commanders – even if it was in large part to Washington’s frequent turnovers – but it’s not like anyone is losing sleep in anticipation of his next game. Truth is, most of these rookies will be lucky to be on NFL rosters in a couple of years.
Part of the reason that some fans feel there is a decline in entertainment is that, with the fading of the older generation, we are long past the days of Brady v Rodgers or (Peyton) Manning v Brees in the same week with a side of Ryan v Rivers – slates that often delivered on the NFL’s breathless hype and made us feel good about devoting the entirety of our Sundays to football.
Of course, those matchups were so interesting because they had years to develop and percolate. And there is hope that those rivalries will be replaced with new ones, like the Mahomes v Hurts matchup we saw on Monday Night Football this week. Mahomes is, after all, already on his way to the Hall of Fame. And the NFL is full of great young quarterbacks who could join him, like Hurts, Herbert, Joe Burrow, Josh Allen and Lamar Jackson. But, right now, it feels like we’re a few years away from any permutation of the NFL’s young guns becoming a rivalry to match Brady v Manning.
As for the younger quarterbacks not on the level of Mahomes, Hurts or Burrow, it doesn’t help their development that so many horrible playcallers are roaming NFL sidelines. Just ask the Chicago Bears’ Justin Fields; clearly Matt Eberflus is not benefiting his development. And the window for Fields to thrive under a real offensive wizard is no fault of his own. A trajectory like Alex Smith, considered a bust in San Francisco, before Jim Harbaugh resurrected his career and Andy Reid helped him soar is rare. (Then again, Reid himself is rare.)
Now we’re left with a number of inept head coaches fighting for their jobs while trotting out struggling young quarterbacks. The increasingly short leash of the head coach position, coupled with the premature trotting out of young quarterbacks, has been detrimental to the position and, in turn, NFL offenses. How are quarterbacks, and in turn offensive systems, supposed to be sustainable in the current climate?
The ramifications are in full force. Yes, there are some great offenses like the Tyreek Hill-charged Miami Dolphins. But scoring has declined for the fourth straight season. Teams combined to score an average 45.9 points in 2021. This season, teams are combining for 43.3 points and the NFL is on pace for its lowest-scoring season since 2009.
The decline is scoring, though, is not just down to struggling offense. The NFL is a cyclical league with offense dominating for periods, before defenses catch up and the whole process starts again. And, at the moment, the league is in a period of defensive innovation. As college offensive schemes were adopted and thrived in the NFL, defensive coordinators turned to college to find solutions of their own.
This year’s most impactful defensive coaches – Baltimore’s Mike Macdonald, New York’s Robert Saleh, Kansas City’s Steve Spagnuolo and Dallas’ Dan Quinn – have turned to college tactics to help mask coverages and to disrupt quarterbacks.
Notably, defensive coordinators have hit on the college style of ‘inverting the downs’: sending pressure early in the down-and-distance to try to force a drive-killing play. And those pressures have become more sophisticated, a charcuterie board of zone-pressures, read-blitzes, single-muggers and so-called creepers. On later downs, defenses have backed off, flooding the field with players in coverage and forcing quarterbacks to matriculate the ball down the field. At every level of the defense, there are more moving parts than ever before, more for quarterbacks to decode at the snap, and that can be particularly hard on young players trying to find their feet in a league where the players are faster, stronger and smarter than the ones they faced in college.
Of course, injuries to the likes of Aaron Rodgers, Burrow and Kirk Cousins are clearly a factor, not just for scoring, but for overall watchability. But the league’s quarterback-friendly rules should also be boosting offensive numbers to offset the defensive innovation. Then again, most offensive lines have yet to catch up to the era of the dominant pass rush that now defines the NFL. Football purists can easily be satiated watching hybrid defensive star Micah Parsons do his thing, but when it’s against Washington’s porous offensive line and Sam Howell under center, it’s just not the same.
The best v the best is what moves the needle, it’s what makes the NFL watercooler talk all week long. But the NFL in its current state feels like a major letdown.
