Plain English with Derek Thompson - A Sports Mystery: What Happened to the NFL Quarterback?

Episode Date: September 20, 2024

Today, a mystery about what some people consider the most important position in sports: What the hell is going on with the NFL quarterback? We are two weeks into the 2024 football season. And as several commentators have pointed out, the quarterback position just doesn’t look right. Passing yards per game are lower than any other year in the 21st century. Passing touchdowns have fallen off a cliff. The average completed pass is shorter than any other year in the recorded history of the sport. Today’s guest is Robert Mays, the host of 'The Athletic Football Show.' We talk about the evolution of the quarterback position, why NFL passing is down, how NFL defense got so smart, and where this is all headed. If you have questions, observations, or ideas for future episodes, email us at [e-mail]. Host: Derek Thompson Guest: Robert Mays Producer: Devon Baroldi Links: Pro Football Reference NFL History Page https://www.pro-football-reference.com/years/NFL/index.htm Mike Sando: QBs Are Younger Than Any Time in 60 Years: https://www.nytimes.com/athletic/4880988/2023/09/21/justin-fields-nfl-young-quarterbacks-trend/ Bill Barnwell on the evolution of the QB: https://www.espn.com/nfl/story/_/id/41217438/how-running-qbs-changed-nfl-dual-threat-history-value-scramble-stats-future Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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What the hell is going on with NFL quarterbacks? We are two weeks into the 2024 football season, and as several commentators have pointed out, the quarterback position just doesn't look right. Passing yards per game are lower than any year in the 21st century. Passing touchdowns have fallen off a cliff. In fact, the share of passes resulting in touchdowns, called TD percentage, is near the lowest rate in NFL history going back before the first Super Bowl to the 1930s. More importantly, the average completed pass in 2024

is shorter than any year in the recorded history. of the sport. NFL rules are built around protecting quarterbacks, making it easier for them to thrive. But by several measures, QBs are off to one of their worst starts in decades. Now, a smart and responsible listener is going to hear all that and want to pipe up and point out that the 2024 season is two weeks old. So talk about small sample sizes, right? Isn't it deeply irresponsible to draw out big picture conclusions about the nature of a sport from just two weeks? but if he broaden the lens, one very important piece of the story

doesn't change at all. It actually just deepens the mystery. I just told you that the average completed pass was shorter in 2024 or has been shorter in 2024 than it was in any year in NFL history. But in fact, the five years with the shortest completed passes on record

are, in chronological order, 2020, 2021, 2021, 2022, 2022, 2023, and 2024. If the NBA is in a golden age of long-distance shooting, the NFL is in a converse golden age of short-distance passing. At the same time that the passing attack in the NFL has gotten historically short, it's also gotten historically young. The athletics, Mike Sandel, reported last year that the average starting quarterback is younger today than any time in the last 60 years.

As I said, the QB position is typically considered the single most important position in sports. And yet the passing attack in the NFL has changed before our eyes in the last decade in a way that I'm not sure many fans appreciate. Or at least I'm not sure just how historically unique they understand this moment to be. Passes are shorter than ever, less likely to be touchdowns than only. almost ever. Coming off the hands of signal callers who haven't been this young since the Kennedy administration, an average passing yards per game, are at the lowest mark in the 21st century. Like I said, what the hell is going on? Today's guest is Robert Mays, the host of the athletic football show. We talk about the evolution

of the quarterback position, why NFL passing is down, how NFL defenses got so smart, And where this is all headed. I'm Derek Thompson. This is plain English. Robert Mays, welcome with the show. Thank you for having me. I'm not just saying this because I'm here. This is truly my favorite podcast.

I listen to every single episode, and I am honored to be on it. So thank you very much. Holy moly. Well, no one can see me blushing right now, but I am beat red. So thank you very, very much. In the open, I reviewed why I think something is happening in football

that doesn't have the name recognition that it deserves. It's not just that this season, the 2024 season, has seen historically anemic play at the quarterback position, the fewest passing yards per game this century, fewest passing touchdowns per pass in decades. It's also that if you look at the entire history of the sport, we've never seen a shorter passing game ever. Average yards per completed catch, according to a football reference, are at all-time lows. And I ask you to be on the show because, you know, not only because I'm a non-professional football watcher who wanted to talk to a professional football analyst, but also because on your podcast, it feels to me like you've been circling this

topic for a few weeks now. So before we even attempt to explain what is happening here and why, let's define what is happening here. Am I nuts? Or is this a historic and significant moment for the quarterback position? I think it's a truly historic moment for offenses in general. And if you look at the cycle and how it's worked over the last 10 or so years, there was a moment where offenses were definitively ahead of defenses. And I think that defenses over the last two seasons specifically have closed that gap. And defenses have really made up a ton of ground and how they're attacking opposing quarterbacks and offenses. And it just feels so much harder across the entire league. We're talking about young quarterbacks. We're talking about the best quarterbacks in the

NFL. It doesn't seem to matter. Everything is just more difficult on that side of the ball. And I think it's a multi-pronged explanation as to why that's happening. If you were going to tell a story about what happened to modern NFL quarterbacks and why it seems like defenses have caught up to offenses after years of historic quarterback production, how would you tell that story? What year should we begin this chronology? I would probably start in like 2011. And 2011 is where we saw a massive moment for the passing boom. All you need to know about that year is that Drew Brees threw for 5,400 yards and 46 touchdowns and did not win the MVP. because of what Aaron Rogers also did. We had three guys throw for 5,000 yards. It was really a moment in the NFL for throwing the football. And then the next season is when we see kind of the dawn of the Legion of Boom in Seattle.

That's when Bobby Wagner gets there. Earl Thomas is there at that point. Richard Sherman comes in. And that's when defenses, I think, really started gaining a little bit of ground back. And over the next three or four years, that style of defense, that single high, cover three, Seat, Hawk three is literally what it was called, started permeating around. on the NFL. Can I just jump in right there as you're talking about single high? I would imagine that roughly half of my audience loves football, watches every single week, and maybe, you know, 30% or so

has no idea what position we're even talking about when you say single high. So I want you to be nerdy. I would not bring Robert Mays on my podcast and say don't be nerdy. Nerd out, please. But let's just in parentheticals define our coverage schemes here. Very simple. So before a play happens, you have a number of safeties that form the coverage shell. And there was a time in the NFL, like when those Seattle teams were really dominating how the structure of defenses looked, where you had one safety at the back of your defense instead of two. And so you can play cover three out of that, which is just three high defenders.

You can play cover one out of that, which is one high defender and man coverage around it. So it's just a simple switch between having two high safeties and having one high safety. So that's what we're talking about with single high defenses. Great. And right on with a chronology. keep going. So you had that moment in, you know, 2013, 2014, 2015, where that style of defense, those cover three single high looks that became in vogue in Seattle, those started permeating the league, guys like Gus Bradley, Dan Quinn, Robert Sala in San Francisco when he first got

there, that became the defense de jour in the league. So pausing here, the story between 2011 and 2018 is the rise and fall and rise again of offensive prowess in the league. You have this boom historic quarterback play in 2011, and then you mentioned defenses, starting with the Seahawks from Seattle, figuring out coverage schemes that contain quarterbacks like Peyton Manning. But then offenses strike back, and they build a better monster with young, innovative coaches like Kyle Shanahan and San Francisco, Sean McVeigh, and Los Angeles. They're taking advantage of the fact that the new defensive schemes are powerful, but they're predictable.

And now the league feels like the juice is back with the offense. So pick up the story in 2018. Kyle Shanahan and Sean McVeigh get hired to be the head coaches of the Rams, or excuse me, of the Niners and the Rams, respectively. And I was type of a conversation with the defensive coordinator last year, who was on the Raven staff in 2018. And he told me that after they had a joint practice with the Rams in 2018, he went back to his hotel room and was writing in his notebook about what that

Rams offense felt like. And he said, they have created a monster that is engineered to destroy us. And that's what Sean McVeigh and Kyle Shanahan were doing. moment. They had built these offenses that were perfectly orchestrated to attack those single high coverages that had become in vogue because of those Seattle teams. And so in 27 and 2018, you saw this boom in offense. And obviously, Patrick Mahomes won the MVP in 2018, where defenses were just too easy to get a beat on. You could understand the way that McVeague talks about is he says they're regulated coverages. I knew what sort of coverages they were going to be in,

so I could orchestrate my offense to start attacking those coverages. Well, then in 2018, Over the course of that season, we start to see moments where defenses begin to fight back. The Bears with Vic Fangio, who was their defensive coordinator that year, really gave McVeigh a lot of problems. And there were a couple other games that season where that happened. And then in the Super Bowl, Bill Belichick employs tons of these different coverage structures that are kind of similar to what Vic Fangio and those teams do. Well, then over the next two to three years, we see teams switch from the single high world to this too high world that Vic Fangio was really not the master of necessarily, but he was the biggest proponent of.

So it just made things a little bit more muddy for opposing offenses. It's not just that you have two high safeties taking away throws down the field. It's that when you have two high safeties, the coverage could be anything. So offenses just had such a harder time getting a beat on, okay, you're lined up this way before the snap. I have a very good idea of what sort of coverage you are going to run. There's only so many things you can do with this structure before the play. Now we're in a place where it could be anything.

And so that has forced a huge shift in how offenses have to devise their plans and how specific they can get in the areas that they're attacking defenses. And I know that's a very long-winded answer, but it is coming from so many different directions. I love that summary. I've never thought about the history of football. as a history of defensive schemes. We're typically so focused on offensive stars

and offensive performance, but it makes perfect sense to me that you could tell a deep history of this league by just looking at how defenses adjust to new ideas about offensive strategy. And I think the upshot here is very straightforward. Football is a dance between offensive innovation and defensive innovation.

The game changes as coordinators are playing these cat and mouse games with each other to eke out in advantage. And today's defenses have just built a better monster, this highly liquid, highly dynamic, deeply camouflaged, too high safety regime that modern quarterbacks don't know how to beat long, and so we're in this golden age instead of short passing attempts. Now, here's what I don't understand. It's now been like five years that passes have gotten shorter and shorter and shorter and shorter. Why haven't offensive coordinators

figured out a new key to allow quarterbacks to defeat the defensive paradigm of this moment? Because it's been combined with defenses also just getting better at defending a lot of the levers that those offenses could pull in 2017. So let's go back to that moment where the Rams and the Ravens are practicing against each other in 2018 and dig into some of the specifics that the Rams were using that were making it hard on those defenses. They were using tons of pre-snap motion, like right before the snap where you just have a guy flying across the formation. And the coach that I was talking to this about, he said when they would send one guy in motion, four of our guys would move. that is not tenable. You can't have that be your answer to that sort of movement on offense.

So defenses over time just develop more sound plans for how they were going to answer and deal with some of these movements. The same thing goes with some of the condensed structures in those Shanahan-McVeigh offenses where the receivers are bunched up close to the formation.

You have two or three guys that are bunched into a stack on one side, and a lot of defensive rules are built on, okay, the number of, number one outside receiver, the number two, next outside receiver, and number three, kind of furthest inside receiver. We have rules for who's going to cover those guys based on how they distribute. Well, if you're changing that number right before the snap or you're bunching all of those guys together, it's harder to understand how you should respond to that. And over time,

defense has just got better honed rules to understand, okay, it's just contact hypothesis. It's really just we've seen this more and more and more, so now we understand how to deal with it. So it wasn't just necessarily that we had too high coverages. It's just that there's defense has got a better sense of these are the things they're doing to break our rules. How are we going to account for that? Which sounds to me like another way of saying offenses thrive when defenses are confused. And right now, NFL defenses are profoundly unbefuddled. They're like chess grandmasters that have been trained to see every single wrinkle, every scheme,

and offenses are still looking for the next move. So I loved all of that. And I'm going to file this whole explanation away as the structural or this schematic explanation, right? What's the matter with NFL quarterbacks? Well, defenses are flatly ahead of offenses when it comes to innovation and scheme. That's number one.

But I don't think that's the only thing that's happening here. So your colleague, Mike Sando at the Athletic, has reported that quarterbacks have never been younger in the last 60 years. So this victory of defense over offense, this flattening of the passing attack that I'm describing, it has coincided with a surge in these baby quarterbacks who are wet behind the ears, don't have much experience,

and are thrown to the wolves. And something I think is, I wonder if you think the playbook is being dumbed down for these younger quarterbacks because they're essentially kids. So what's the story here? If the quarterback position is the so-called most important position in sports, why are today's quarterbacks so historically young? That transition happens because of the new CBA that was installed in 2010.

So that CBA, the collective bargaining agreement in the NFL instills a rookie salary cap scale. So every pick has a slotted salary for where you are drafted. In the previous iteration of the NFL, these quarterbacks that were drafted at the top of the draft, they're negotiating their own contracts. So the best possible example of this is in 2009, Matthew Stafford was the number one pick in the draft by the Detroit Lions. his contract on a per year basis in 2009 gave him more money per year than Caleb Williams' deal that he just signed after being drafted by the Bears right now. The salary cap has gone up like four and a half times over that stretch.

I don't know the exact number, but it's astronomical. So that's the difference that we're talking about here. So because of that new rookie salary scale, teams have been incentivized to try to take swings on these young quarterbacks because the excess savings that you get if you hit on one of them, allows you to put that money back into other areas of your roster. I think the moment that was really important for this was what happened with Russell Wilson and the Seahawks. Where Russell Wilson was a third round pick, he was making about $500,000 a year.

And what Seattle could do with the rest of their roster because of that was huge. And it was a tipping point moment, I feel like, in the way that people were conceiving of how they wanted to pay the position. If you go back to 2010, the year before the CBA is installed or 2009, and you look at the makeup of the quarterback position in the NFL, you have guys that probably wouldn't even be starters in today's NFL. The best example for me is like Matt Schaub. So Matt Schaub was a quarterback who was a backup for the Falcons. After his third season as a backup for the Falcons, the Texans trade for him and give him a new contract. That would never happen in today's NFL because the team seeking out a quarterback would rather

go draft Will Levis of the Titans in the second round, see if they could save a bunch of money by doing that rather than trading for a veteran and handing him a contract. So the economics of the position have incentivized teams more than ever to be younger and less expensive because of the benefits that potentially come with it. One thing I'd love to do is imagine what ideas 20 years from now will seem obvious for our own time. Like we're in an era today where it's just a conventional wisdom that if your team sucks, you draft a quarterback.

It is basically a truism. Do you suck? Draft a QB. And look, maybe that strategy is the right one, given the CBA and the relative cheapness of rookie quarterbacks. But the truth is, this strategy, and you can think of it as like,

hire the driver before you build the car, right? This strategy, I think, is wrong for a lot of teams. It really, really exquisitely depends on your team's ability to scout extraordinary talent that will thrive under shitty conditions. And I think the record shows that it just doesn't work out that often.

Roughly half or more of the top-drafted QBs in the NFL fail in their first, what, three, five years. These teams keep hiring the driver for broken cars, and then five weeks out of the season, they're like, holy shit, the car's still broken. Well, yeah, of course it is. It seems like there's an opposite approach that you could take as an NFL team.

And that is, if you're not very good, you take advantage of the fact that everybody else wants to draft a QB, early in the draft, and you purposefully, strategically overvalue other positions, left tackle, defensive end, right? You build the car first, and then you hire your driver. How do you think about this question of whether the new collective bargaining agreement has subtly pushed teams to place too much faith in young quarterbacks to rescue their franchise? And this strategy is like locking a lot of terrible teams in the basement of the NFL.

There are examples on both sides, and that's what makes this so complicated. So if you look at the best quarterbacks in the NFL right now, Josh Allen and Joe Burrow were dropped in as rookies. Joe Burrow gets hurt as a rookie, but Josh Allen was in a terrible situation, but he got a lot of experience, and he's able to grow through some of those issues. Then you look at Patrick Mahomes. Patrick Mahomes was given a car that was ready to drive. He had Andy Reed as his head coach and play callers, one of the greatest offensive

of coaches of all time. Tyree Kill was already on that team when he was dropped onto it. Travis Kelsey was already on that team when he was dropped onto it. And he didn't start until his second season. And I think that there are competing opinions about this within the league. Because if you look at somebody like Jordan Love of the Packers, he sat for several years before he was given an opportunity to start because they had Aaron Rogers. He gets dropped in last year and has much more success than we would typically see from a first year starter, similar to Patrick Mahomes. So the question becomes, is that time on the bench, that time to learn, time to get used to the NFL game, even from a routine standpoint, how you study, how you understand

it. Is that causal towards success, or is it coincidental that some of the guys who have been given that time have gone on to be some of the better quarterbacks in the NFL? And I think if you talk to 10 people in the NFL, you'd probably get five people on one side and five people on the other. To connect this to the animating question of the whole episode, do you agree with the idea that as quarterbacks get younger, the playbooks that they're given have to be simplified, right? They're young. They've never played the NFL before. And so holding everything else equal, younger quarterbacks working off of simplified playbooks in an era of complex defensive schemes that you've described in the answer to the first question, that this dynamic is naturally

going to lead to a bit of softening in excellence in the quarterback position. So I think there's an element of that, but I also think that what we're asking of quarterbacks in general has become more simplified. And this is going to get a little bit naughty, but I think it's worth exploring. So if you go back to the heyday of Peyton Manning and Tom Brady in 2005-2006, the game was so much less dynamic. Peyton Manning could walk to the line of scrimmage,

he could look at the defense, he could know what coverage they were in, he could know who was blitzing, and he could literally change the play at the line of scrimmage to get them into a premium play against that defensive look. So quarterbacks were making decisions based on what they thought the coverage was before the snap. If it's this coverage, I'm going to go to this guy.

If it's this coverage, I'm going to go to this guy. Going back to what we were talking about at the beginning, because all of this stuff is getting so murky, that's no longer how the NFL works. The way that quarterback progressions work now is you're not picking a side based on a coverage unless you're playing against a very specific sort of team. What you're doing is you're starting on one side

and you're just cycling through your options from one side of the field to the other. Because even if you're a couple, coach, and I've talked with plenty of coaches about this, they'll be rewatching a play. They'll pause it at the top of a quarterback's drop, and they'll say, I don't even know what the coverage is as I watch back through it. So how can the quarterback know? And Tom Brady has talked a lot about this, essentially saying that we're lobotomizing the

quarterbacks. We're not asking them to understand the game at this high level anymore, but you talk to people in the league and they say, well, yeah, Tom will say that because when he was playing, defenses made it easy to play that way. So I think overall, we're asking less of quarterbacks from a mental perspective than we ever have just because defenses have made it harder for quarterbacks to operate that way of the likes of the Mannings and the Brady's that could do it in their heyday. So this question of why quarterback plays down, we talked about structure, number one, we talked about

QB age and experience. Number two, I have a few questions about a third category. And that category is talent. It just seems to me like modern defenses are faster, not just schematically more complex. Not just structurally more sophisticated? No, faster. Is there anything to this idea that there's a larger delta now between the average speed and athleticism of a defensive lineman and the average speed and athleticism of the people he's

going up against, right? What's the smart way to think about a talent gap between offenses and defenses right now? I think that's true. I think there is a growing gap in the athleticism between those two positions. If you look at the guys that are playing on the defensive line in the NFL right now, they are bigger, stronger, and faster than ever. And offensive linemen, offensive line is a learned position. Just think about the mechanics of playing offensive line. You're moving backwards.

It's not a natural movement. And it requires a lot of coaching and technique. And we've gotten to a place based on the new collective bargaining agreement where we have less practice time than ever and less full contact practice time than ever. So I just think that offensive linemen working with each other, there's much. more holes in that. You see guys failing to pass off stunts between defensive linemen. You see guys falling off of things in the run game because the timing is off, especially early in the season. So if there's going to be an athleticism gap between defense and offense and offensive linemen are just less sharp and less honed, especially early in the season than they've ever been,

that's how you get games like that Bears Texans game on Sunday, where the Texans are just ripping apart the Bears' offensive line over and over and over again. And I think that's what you're seeing a lot more of, especially over the first couple weeks of this season. I can imagine several explanations for why defensive athleticism is higher than offensive line athleticism. But specifically to your point, it really does seem like defensive linemen are just kicking the butts of offensive linemen right now. And I wonder, are there upstream reasons why the supply of defensive stars is greater than the supply of, say, new offensive linemen? Like even at the level of high school football or college coaching, why does it say,

seem like there is just more defensive talent that's proven so hard for offensive coordinators to overcome. If you look at the way that defensive lines are constructed, you can have eight to ten different players cycle through your defensive line in any given game. Offensive linemen do not rotate. So there's only so many types of players who can be starting offensive linemen in the NFL. If you're a guy like Bryce Hoff of the Eagles, who was more of a designated pass rush type player he was on the Jets because he was undersized, you're viable. on third and seven in the NFL. You can't have situational offensive linemen.

So the pool of people that you can pull from to find starting caliber players at that position is inherently just going to be smaller because you're not cycling through a bunch of different body types based on the situation within the game. I want to throw another question at you that touches on talent,

and this question is going to seem like trolling, but I want to make sure that the box is checked. Is it possible today's quarterbacks are just worse? Is it possible that with the, exception of Pat Mahomes and maybe Josh Allen, and I guess you can throw Lamar in there because he's an alien and very hard to analogize to any other quarterback in NFL history. What if Tom Brady and Peyton Manning and Drew Brees and primetime Aaron Rogers, what if they

were just better than everyone playing today? Is that a possibility that you are willing to even entertain? I don't think so, just because if you think about what the game looks like at lower levels. Kids are throwing the ball thousands and thousands and thousands of times before they even get to college football now. So I think the time on task has made them more equipped and more accurate pastors by the time they get to the NFL overall. I just think that the quality of quarterback play at a baseline level is probably better than it's ever been just because of the way the game has played and taught at younger, younger levels. But when you're thinking about Peyton Manning and Tom Brady and Drew Brees and Aaron Rogers, you're thinking about those guys,

I'm assuming, when they're like 32, 33 years old. Patrick Mahomes turned 29 yesterday. And I think that's part of the issue here is that because their teams are disincentivized from sticking with veteran quarterbacks who get paid, you know, somewhat near the top of the market, but a slight step down because the finances are not in your favor to build that way. We're taking away opportunities from those sorts of quarterbacks. So I just think that the way that the position is built within the league makes it feel like there's worse quarterback play. But I don't think that means that quarterbacks overall are worse at playing the position and the mechanics of throwing a football than they've been in the past. So this reminds me of one of my favorite sports debates, which is, are we sure that today's star athletes are better than the historic legends of 50, 70 years ago?

Like to pick a classic example, what would Babe Ruth, what would that man's body with all the fat and the cigar smoke and the liquor in his stomach, if you put him in a time machine, threw him in a 2024 and he faced today's best pitchers, would he be Shohei Otani? Would he be Aaron Judge? Would he be Babe Ruth? And of course, it's impossible to answer these questions in team sports because modern offenses are always going against modern defenses. And so sometimes their talent counterbalances each other. But there's some things you can look at. to see if talent is improving over time. And one thing I'd like to look at is field goals. Because guess what hasn't changed? The mechanics of field goals. It's the same in 1975 as it is in 2024. And so in a way, you can ask yourself, is the overall skill level of today's players higher?

Like, can we use field goal percentage as a proxy to show that average players today are just better at their thing than they were half a century ago? And if you go to football reference for this, if you look up field goal percentage, it is higher in 2024 than any year in NFL history. There are more field goals made over 50 yards, very, very long field goals than any year in NFL history. Kickers who are operating in this kind of strategic vacuum where you can measure their talent

and athletic quality without it being muddied by the presence of a defense, they're better than they've ever been, period. And so I do think our baseline expectation should be that for whatever talent category we're trying to evaluate, sports stars are better now than they've ever been, period. And this is not my way of entering through some backdoor into arguing that the Bond James is actually better than Michael Jordan or any other all-time great conversation. But to your point, I'm pretty sure that anybody who argues that overall talent was better in some previous decade, that had worse nutrition and worse training and worse understanding of muscle generation and rest,

etc. I tend to not believe that. It's a very good point, and it's probably the one that I would bring up. If you're talking about a specialized skill that people are doing over and over and over again, kicking and punting are the best they've ever been in the NFL. But those are isolated moments. There's no defense, really, for kicking and punting. And so that's what I would say about the quarterback play.

Yeah, was Peyton Manning an absolute machine? Sure. But for a good chunk of Peyton Manning's career, when he would play against a defense playing cover two, he would walk to the line of scrimmage, there would be two high safeties, and they would just play the way they lined up. There was a play on Sunday when the Vikings were playing the 49ers,

where the Vikings had all of their defensive players, except for four of them lined up all the way across the line of scrimmage in a look that we call cover zero, which means everyone is coming and there's no safety help. At the snap, the Vikings bail out of that look and play cover two behind it from that look. So it's, and I think that that's one of the things that people are kind of misrepresenting when it comes to this idea of covered two defenses or two high shells. It's like, this stuff isn't new.

It's how dynamic the path to that final coverage structure looks that's making it so hard to play the position. So I just think that defenses are so much harder to understand and manipulate now than they've ever been. Not that quarterbacks are necessarily worse at playing the position. How do teams, and maybe just as interestingly, how do scouts, and general managers, talk about the thing we're talking about today when they're evaluating quarterback prospects.

Because I can imagine two very different philosophies that I would call reasonable. On the one hand, let's say you're a general manager, you're the scout of an NFL team, your job is to find the next Pat Mahomes by looking at the best college players. You could say nothing changes.

You could say we've always wanted accuracy, we've always wanted decision-making, we've always wanted the ability of quarterbacks to target long passes to keep the safeties back and open up the defense, we're going to look for the same thing in 2024 and 2025 that we were looking for in 1994, in 1995. On the other hand, it just seems like the game has changed. And in particular, it seems like this idea of defensive camouflaging

is a much more prominent feature of today's game. And it would be useful to find some proxies to figure out how college prospects, would fare against those more complicated schemes. And at the same time, I look at the career of Pat Mahomes, and you look at the statistic of air yards per completed pass in his career. How far are his passes traveling that are caught? So in 2018, when he had probably his best statistical season,

won his first MVP, his average completed pass traveled 6.5 yards in the air. And this year, it's 3.3 yards. That's just two weeks, but 3.3 yards. We're talking about a 50% decline in air yards by the best quarterback in the NFL. It just seems to me like the position is changing. And maybe our theories for scouting the quarterback position should change too. What do you think? I think that the change has already happened because we're at a place now where I don't

think there will ever be a quarterback drafted with the first overall pick that can't move, that can't create with his legs because of how good defenses have gotten. What you need now, if you're seeking out an elite quarterback, and if you're picking a guy first overall, you better hope that he's an elite quarterback. You need somebody who is going to be able to access things on the field that are not solely available based on the structure of the play that you're giving him. And there are a lot of avenues toward that. The easiest answer is, if things break down, can you scramble for a first down? And there's a reason that quarterback scrambles are now more valuable than they've ever been as part of the modern NFL, because defenses are so good that inevitably you're going to have three, four, five plays a game where you're going to have to create something out of nothing.

So that's part of it. And we see that with Josh Allen. We see that with Mahomes. We see that with Lamar Jackson, Kyle and Murray, all of these guys that have a certain skill set that is prevalent in the quarterback position that didn't exist 15 or 20 years ago. The other side of this is we need guys who are creative throwers from the pocket. And so that's a slightly different thing. But it still is a more dynamic version of the position than what we had seen in the kind

of the statue-esque quarter. back era. Guys like that are Jordan Love, Matthew Stafford, C.J. Stroud is that a little bit, you need a certain creativity to what you're accessing on the field that's maybe a little bit outside of how the X's and O's are drawn up on a chalkboard. And I think that those qualities and that being like a requisite part of playing the position, that has already crept into how people around the league are looking at college prospects and the types of people that they're seeking out. It's funny because you could do this analysis. just by looking at the history of mannings, right?

Like Peyton Manning, he was a statue. I adored him, but he was a statue in the pocket. Eli Manning, statue. But if you look at Archmanning, the backup now starting quarterback for the University of Texas Austin, comes into the game and he rips off a 47-yard run. I don't think that Peyton Manning

has run 47 yards in his life. And I'm talking about on and off the field. So it is unbelievable to watch an evolutionary Manning essentially adopt the very skills made necessary for modern quarterbacking by these new complex defensive schemes. So it's just funny to hold the analysis constant and just across the Manning surname.

At the top of the show, I talked about how baseball I feel like has become a solved game. And to a certain extent, I think, basketball feels increasingly solved as well. Just teams creating space to get three-point shots. And what I mean, my solved isn't quite like, the game is over.

The game is boring. It's rather that I think it's difficult for coaches and players to independently shift away from the current logic of those games. The logic in baseball is faster pitches and more spin. The logic in basketball is more threes. And there's nothing that I see strategically moving against that. Football is different.

Football does not seem to move structurally. I think, as you've beautifully told, it seems to move cyclically. At some point, like, yes, defenses are winning now, but offenses are going to start winning in the next few years. how do you see this trend beginning to swing back to the quarterback or to offenses more generally? What will that have to look like? It's the most old school answer possible. It's running the football.

I mean, that's where we've come all the way back to that answer. And if you look at the way that defenses are built, especially now that players can wear any number that they want on defense essentially, there's no real way to understand who's playing which position. We have all these hybrid kind of undersized players. Well, if we're going to have all these undersized players, let's not worry about who's play in what position. Let's just line up with two tight ends and see if we can just run the ball down their throats over and over and over again. And I think we're starting to see that. Running for a very long time when compared to passing was a notably inefficient way to move

the ball. And that's why the league started drifting away from these run-heavy attacks that we had seen over the years. But as defenses have gotten smaller and more complex, I do think that we're seeing teams start to find and figure out and re-realize the benefits of running the ball. You need to be more creative than you've been in years past. It's not just as simple as we want to run it. You need to have actual layers to what you're doing and why you're doing it because defenses have gotten better at defending running plays as well. But I do think on a broad level, we're kind of arriving back to that as the best answer for how to attack these teams. So I was doing a lot of research on the difference between the NFL in 2003 and 2023,

to look at 20-year changes. And here's a fun stat. In 2003, there were 12 running backs who averaged 20 attempts per game. All right? Twelve, let's call them, you know, workhorse running backs. Ricky Williams, Jamal Lewis, Edron James, Stephen Davis, Clinton Portis, Amon Green, Travis Henry, Deuce McAllister, Fred Taylor, Sean Alexander, Curtis Martin, Priest Holmes. If you don't follow football, those names will mean absolutely nothing to you. If you did follow football like it was your religion in 2003, like I did,

you will feel a wave of nostalgia passing over your heart. Last year, there was zero, right? So between 2003 and 2023, we've gone from 12 workhorse running backs to zero. Do you think that a reemergence of the running game will see the reemergence of the workhorse, Jamal Lewis, Edgroom James, or do you think the future of the running game looks more like this platoon where teams have a bunch of quick guys who none of them get more than 150, 50 or so carries a year, but together they make up the bulk of the offense. I think it's probably going to be somewhere in the middle.

And if you look at what the Eagles did this offseason, to me, they're probably the best example. The Eagles think about how they build an NFL team and think about resources like they're a hedge fund. Like they're always trying to find distressed assets. I mean, the way that they think about their cap and how they seek out players is very interesting. They signed Seguan-Barkley this offseason, I think in part because they were buying the dip in the running back market. they looked at where the running back market had gone

compared to other positions and said, know what, this is two steps too far. Like if we're going to be paying, I'm going to use a player that maybe people listening to the show don't necessarily know at first glance, but Darno Mooney, who's like the number three receiver for the Falcons, he's getting paid on average per year, the same as Saquan Barkley.

And they're going to be teams that look at that and say, no way. Like, we've taken it way too far. And that's what Saquan theoretically gives the Eagles. He gives them somebody who can catch the ball. He gives them the foundation of their running game. So I think that there's going to be a moment where those guys kind of come back. But I think overall, the NFL has gotten smart enough where they understand.

Having a good running game is as much about the infrastructure of the running game than it is about an individual back. So maybe there are going to be four or five guys who transcend that idea, your Sequans, your Christian McCaffreys, your Bichon Robinson's in Atlanta. But overall, infrastructure and the way that we build the running game overall is still more important than any one player that we can hand the ball to. I hope I'm not oversimplifying things when I say that to a certain extent when it comes to the success of an NFL team, you've got players, you've got coaches, and then you've got, let's call it scheme. Is it possible that one lesson in the last few years, as we've seen quarterback efficiency decline, is that we are underrating, severely underrating one of these categories, namely to my mind, scheme. that in an era of schematic sophistication, is it possible that the difference between an average coordinator and an excellent coordinator isn't worth like $5 million?

It's worth $20 million. It's worth $50 million. It's worth half your salary cap. I guess I'm saying as football becomes more complex, does coordinator ability become exponentially more valuable? It's always going to be a little bit of both. you're always going to need the requisite amount of talent to compete in the NFL. Sean McVeigh is a very good offensive football coach.

Matthew Stafford is a phenomenal quarterback, like a phenomenal quarterback, and it doesn't work without Matthew Stafford. On the other side of the ball, he had Aaron Donald for his entire time as the Rams Head coach. If you look at the players that they have in San Francisco, they're the Avengers. I mean, it's absolutely ridiculous, the skill position talent that the Niners have. For me, it's more about the group of haves and have-nots when it comes to offensive coaches. are you, do you have an offensive ecosystem in your building that is going to consistently be a multiplier on the players that you bring through? So if you have superstar players, are they going to look like unstoppable players?

If you have star players, are they going to look like superstars? If you have average guys, are they going to look good? If you have one of those people, if you have a McVeigh, a Shanahan, a Matt LaFlewer, a Mike McDaniel, these guys who are going to make the most of the offensive talent consistently, when you see that compared to the teams that don't, It's night and day. You feel the difference. So I don't necessarily think that scheme is going to be the Trump card in all of this. You still need the right level of talent. But the gap between the teams that are maximizing that talent and the teams that aren't,

you see it lay pretty bare right now. Robert Mays, thank you very much. This was really fun. Absolutely. Appreciate it. Thank you for listening. Today's episode was produced by Devin Baraldi. Our summer schedule for plain English for the next few weeks will be one episode a week

on Fridays. We'll see you next week.