First, a heartfelt holiday thanks to all of you lovely readers out there enjoying this fantasy thing of ours. With the football season all but behind us, I’m putting away my usual speculator tools to do some spelunking into the 2024 NFL season to date. Before we begin, I’d like to thank Brandon Funston for green-lighting my exploratory mission without knowing whether or not I’d find anything. I figured we’d start with the assertion that offense is down league-wide this year — whether that’s true or not — and then see if we can uncover why (should the assertion prove true).
(All data spans 10 years, per TruMedia)
Was offense down in 2024?
All you had to do was open a social media app to hear the moans and groans of frustrated fantasy players early in the 2024 campaign. I felt it, too. Or at least I think I did. That’s the thing about anecdotal evidence — it often lacks verification and fails to represent the greater sample. Maybe it was just the more heavily televised games. Maybe I just drafted terribly. Regardless, it’s nice to see where we stand.
My journey’s first step almost landed right on a rake, focusing on NFL scoring — an output rather than input. This season’s 22.8 points scored per game lands directly in the middle of the pack of the past decade, but it fails to capture critical context with a change in perspective — the devil is always in the details. Check out 2024 in relation to the field through a more efficiency-based lens, plotting total plays with yards per game (image below). Suddenly, the 22.8 average point total I alluded to earlier appears to be doing some very heavy lifting. It turns out 2024 ranks dead last in plays run with a bottom-three-yardage output. Long story long, if we ran 2024 back through a simulator 10,000 times with the same outputs, you can bet the average point total drops closer to the recent lows of 2022 and 2023.
It feels safe enough to proceed confidently with a confirmation of a significant offensive drop this season. Now that the “what” has been established, let’s split the outputs into run versus pass to try and find a “where.”
Where did the drop in offense occur?
Before I could even start comparing and contrasting offensive phases at a granular level, I was stopped dead in my tracks. Somehow, through all the content and number-crunching I do, I still hadn’t noticed the league running the ball at its highest clip in a decade. Talk about missing the forest for the trees. And rushes have gone for nearly as many yards, on average, as at any point in the past 10 years (image below). Lots of running plays inherently bleed the clock, but effective rushing bleeds games. Do that enough, and it impacts the season.
It looks like we identified at least a part of the “where” the apparent drop in fantasy production occurred. That was fruitful. I guess it’s better to be lucky than good sometimes — but I don’t want to walk away from passing altogether just yet, even if it’s to get a basic idea of what happened.
If you’ve been scratching your head so far because you could swear passing is also responsible for the drop-off, you aren’t wrong. Dropbacks, attempts, and completions per game are also all at decade-lows. And that’s not all. It’s worse than we may have thought — the lower frequency of total passes coincides with the lowest depth of target in our sample as well (image below). Considering the undeniable trend, I’m afraid the wet blanket era is here to stay. Consider our “where” identified. The only thing left now is the “why”…
Why did the drop in offense occur?
I doubt I can put much of a dent in the last part of this problem in this brief exercise — if I could, I’d probably be carrying a team-themed clipboard with keys to an operational facility. Our ability to track data hasn’t truly caught up to the league’s defensive complexity. With the fluidity of so many moving pieces, it’s nearly impossible to compress that sheer amount of information into single, quantifiable data points. So, what do we wind up with as analysts or gamers? A beautiful yet flawed combination of art and science, where assertions spawn from tape-watching and spreadsheet mining — only to get sent for testing, knowing there’s a high likelihood of failure.
Anyway, I figured, why not throw my hat in the ring? After digging through dozens of stats and throwing my hands in the air, the only thing I wound up with was a dumber look on my face than when I started. (Ha!) Kidding aside, I started fiddling with some of the more detailed TruMedia filters when the (dim) light bulb went off …
(For reference, TruMedia coverage data began in 2019)
Could everyone’s favorite villain, zone coverage, and, more specifically, the vaunted two-high shell, be responsible for turning off the lights? I’d gotten so tired of hearing about it on every pregame broadcast and podcast for so long that the mental block became real. Well, if you’ve heard of Occam’s Razor before, you may not be surprised to find out that, for all intents and purposes, the simplest answer is the most correct.
Conclusion
As far as shaping future fantasy-related decisions, I think we continue to see the restoration of running backs to their former fantasy glory. At the same time, expect major consolidation at the WR position, outside those players with the versatility to work from multiple spots on the field.
What separates wideouts like CeeDee Lamb and Justin Jefferson from the pack by providing a lethal combo of ceiling and floor is their deployment and subsequent production from the slot. Some teams will lean so heavily into shell-based preventative styles that deep shots can and will sometimes be completely eliminated. If I’ve learned anything this year, it’s that I’ll be doing my best to avoid spending premium draft capital on fantasy assets with those particular limitations going forward.
(Photo of Tyreek Hill: Megan Briggs/Getty Images)
