The Athletic Football Show: A show about the NFL - From XLIX to LX: How the league has changed since the last Patriots-Seahawks Super Bowl

Episode Date: February 5, 2026

Eleven years ago, the Patriots and Seahawks met in one of the most iconic Super Bowls of all-time. Those two teams seemed to define the league back then, with Tom Brady and the Patriots dynasty on one side, and the Legion of Boom defense on the other. The league looks quite a bit different now, and not just in the way that things set a decade apart are bound to be different. So how has the league changed in the 11 intervening years between Patriots-Seahawks Super Bowls? Robert Mays, Derrik Klassen and Dave Helman consider that question on this episode of The Athletic Football Show.Connect with The Athletic Football ShowBuy our merch! http://theathletic.lnk.to/tafsmerchYT: https://www.youtube.com/@TAFootballShowPodcasts: https://podfollow.com/the-athletic-football-show/viewX: https://x.com/TA_FootballShowIG: https://www.instagram.com/tafootballshowTikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@tafootballshowDiscord: http://discord.gg/theathleticfootballshowCall us: 847-448-0701Email us: [e-mail]: Robert MaysCo-Hosts: Derrik Klassen and Dave HelmanExecutive Producer: Michael BellerVideo Producer: Katy DuffyAudio Producer: Michael BellerSocial Producer: Scott KrinchFollow Robert on Bluesky: @robertmays.bsky.socialFollow Derrik on Bluesky: @qbklass.bsky.socialFollow Robert on X: @robertmaysFollow Derrik on X: @QBKlassTheme song: HauntedWritten by Dylan Slocum, Trevor Dietrich, Ruben Duarte, Kyle McAulay, and Meredith VanWoert / Performed by Spanish Love SongsCourtesy of Pure Noise / By arrangement with Bank Robber Music, LLC Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Welcome to the Athletic Football Show. I'm Robert Mays. Radio Row, Super Bowl time, rolls on today. We're doing something a little bit different on today's show. We've talked a lot about this game over the course of this week so far. We're going to talk more about this game on tomorrow's show. Today, we're doing a look back. Because we've seen this Super Bowl before, the Patriots and the Seahawks,

I thought this would be a good opportunity to look at how the NFL feels different and is different. in 2025 compared to what the league looked like in 2014. This is a very open-ended conversation. I kind of just, we gave this prompt, and Dave and Derek went with it, whatever way they wanted to. And so some of this is schematic. Some of this is the makeup of certain player and coaching pools in the NFL. Some of this is decision-making based.

So there are a lot of different layers and a lot of different buckets that we took this conversation to. Just what feels different about football and about professional football now compared to what it felt like in 2014. Very much enjoyed this discussion with both of those guys. Let's get to it right now. Welcome to the Athletic Football Show coming to you guys live from Radio Row here in San Francisco. I think it's Media Row now.

I think that's what the science say. Oh, Belor's just booing me from the little peanut gallery over there. I don't like Media Row. I will always call it Radio Row. It should just be Radio Row. I mean, to be fair to them, like how many of these boohing me, to radio anymore. It doesn't matter. We're all calling at that anyway. It's like who's calling it the Willis Tower in Chicago? No one, even if it's objectively correct. It's a great point.

Here again today, rolling through with our Super Bowl coverage, we're going to take a little bit of a look back today. We're going to do plenty of looking forward tomorrow during the preview show. You can't really do five shows about the Super Bowl. I don't think you should do five shows about the Super Bowl. And so we're going to spend a little bit of time today going back and looking at the ways the NFL has changed and maybe some of the ways it stayed the same since the last time the Seahawks and the Patriots played in the Super Bowl. The moment that we saw this was the matchup, my mind immediately goes to where I was at that time, where the league was at that time. And so I wanted to use the fact that we have seen this game, this exact matchup before,

kind of do a little bit of a stroll down memory lane about the way the league feels different now compared to the Malcolm Butler game. A really perfect football game. Like everything about it, a very memorable Super Bowl. I'm really happy about this exercise. It's exactly the type of thing that I love about the athletic football show. But before we look back, can we look to our left and acknowledge... I thought Robert was going to let it run.

No, I was not. I was not. Before we go any further, we just need to address... Derek is paying off his wins pool bet. If you're listening to this, please, go find, come find us on YouTube, come find us on social media. You look fantastic. Of all the episodes to go find on YouTube, this is the one. You can't see it, but the tail is the best part. Go check out the social media and you will see how the tail just perfectly falls. The fact that you did not

have to cut a hole in the pants, I find a little bit sad. I wish that you had had to cut a hole in the pants in order for the tail to work. So for me too, I was thinking, I had not like perfectly tested the outfit before I brought it here. And then I realized I was like, I don't have scissors if I have to cut the butt out of my pants so that I can fit the tail through. And then I put it all on and thank God it like sits right above my waistline anyway. Two important moments from this morning. Nate was the first person you ran into outside of your hotel, which is just incredibly fortuitous timing. Again, if you would like to check out that interaction, we caught it on camera. It is available to you on all of our social media channels. The best part about having to wear this, and what I mean by

best is the worst when you're the one doing it. You're going to see a lot of people you know, but it you were going to meet people for the first time that you know from the internet. And so seeing you meet JJ Zacharisen just standing here next to Matt Harmon while being dressed like that. And this is your first impression meeting this person. Those are my favorite moments from today. And I hope we get several more of them. It's some combination of meeting people for the first time like that or people not even realizing it to me. Like I was talking Matt Harmon right there. He said he had saw me earlier and was like, who did they let in here? And then I shouted out to him right after that. And he was like, it took him a second to be like, oh, I do know that guy.

I ran into an acquaintance when you showed up to Radio Row. And she was like, I was going to come say hi, but you were talking to some lunatic in a wolf costume. So I just left it alone. And I was like, that's still a fair descriptor. It's a good call. As an objective observer to this, do you, where would you rank this? Like, the best to worst, hot dog, face paint, glitter, and this. How would you stack them up? Oh, I think the face paint was the worst. Really? Yeah.

I don't understand how everyone has this. He was, like, not afraid of this at all. I don't understand why you don't feel at all, like, worried about the face paint. You don't think that was a bad one. The unicorns and the flowers just like, doesn't really freak me out that much. I think because, like, the hot dog costume. I'm also hot right now. Well, it looks so itchy.

Yeah. That's where I'm itchy and hot. The actual inside material looks so shitty that I just can't even imagine how uncomfortable you are. It's like a burlap sack in you. Yeah. It's terrible. In my mind, I'm just like, yes, the costume is crazy. but you look at Derek and you're like, that's Derek.

He's still wearing glasses. That's Derek Classen. If you've got shit on your face, like face pain and glitter, and again, like you're going to like make eye contact with an NFL player or somebody important that you've never met before, there's no getting past that. There's no like, hey, I'm dressed like a wolf, but this is my face. I'm David Hellman.

No, you have glitter on your face and that's tough. The fact that you didn't have to talk to Fred Warner while wearing that, I think we should have made you wearing yesterday. Oh, that would have been devastating. Of all the players, that. I'm a little bit disappointed that that's not what happened, but we move past it. I don't know if he's here, but if I ever meet Tyler Shook, I'm going to be like, this doesn't matter to you, but you saved me from having to do this.

He's here this week. Is he? All right, I got to find Tyler Shook. At some point, he may be stopping by. I'm not sure if we actually booked that or not. All right, so we, this is a very open-ended exercise. I gave you guys very little direction about this. It was essentially go back, look at what the league looked like in 2014, and look at what the league was in 2025,

and let's have a conversation about those two worlds. And so I assume we're going to land on like three or four things each, just kind of maybe a dozen things that compare the NFL in 2014 to the NFL in 2025. Derek, I was peeking over your shoulder earlier and saw your notes. The one at the top for you is also one that I had in some capacity. So I'm going to let you kick this off. What is the first thing that when you were comparing the NFL 10 years ago, 11 years ago to the NFL now that struck you?

It's something that has been on the mind. of people, I think, kind of since Philip Rivers came back and had to play a few games, is that the age disparity in really all-starting quarterbacks, but like the best starting quarterbacks is a lot different than it was in 2014 than it is now. Like right now, the average age of the top 10 guys in QBR is 28.9 years old. Only three of them are above 30 years old, which is Matthew Stafford, obviously, Dak Prescott, and then Mahomes is barely 30. Like, he barely hits that marker.

Back in 2014, the average age of a top 10 QBR. quarterback was 32 and a half. So a three and a half year difference. I was talking to Belor about this before as we were talking earlier. That's like an entire contract. It's like an entire extra contract until these guys became that good. And with that group, it's only three of them that are below 30 years old. It was Russell Wilson, who was six. And then really at the bottom of that, it was Joe Flacco and Matt Ryan, who were barely under 30. They were 29. Like it's just the caliber of guys and what kinds of quarterbacks are good right now is so different. Was Andrew Luck in there? Andrew Luck was actually 11. So he was very close.

But it wouldn't have changed the age thing that much because 11th this year barely qualifying was like Mac Jones. So it's like the eight, he was probably about the same age that Andrew Luck was. That was one of the, when I was looking back at just statistics from 2014, seeing Andrew Luck at the top of a lot of those lists, I was just like, oh man.

It made me go back and watch the Bengals playoff game that he played, Doug. The throw that he makes to Dante Moncrief is just like all time. We've got Dante Moncrief mentions on the show. There's going to be a lot of remember some guys I think associated with this show. One of my first notes was very similar to this. It was essentially just the age disparity with quarterbacks in the NFL. So you looked at it through QBR. I just looked at it for primary starters.

You know, the guys that were the starting quarterback for their team entering the season. There were 13 primary starting quarterbacks in 2014 that were at least 31 years old. Peyton Manning, Tom Brady, Drew Brees, Josh McCown, Carson Palmer, Tony Romo. Remember the Josh McCown 2014 season that contracted he got from the Bucks because of how he played the Bears? How could I forget? Classic times. Carson Palmer, Tony Romo, Eli, Manning, Philip Rivers, Ben Rathesberger, Kyle Orton, a lot of former bear starting

quarterbacks in this list, Ryan Fitzpatrick, Aaron Rogers, Jay Culler, 13 guys. This year, in the NFL, there were six primary starting quarterbacks who were 31 or older. Aaron Rogers, Joe Flacco, Matthew Stafford, Gino Smith, Dak Prescott, Jared Gough. That was it. So twice as many guys were at least 31 in 2014 as there were in 2025. And I think we understand why this is the case, right? The economics associated with starting quarterbacks in the NFL, teams are incentivized to go really young and really cheap. Because in 2014, I still think we were just coming to the epiphany about rookie scale quarterbacks and their value. I mean, the 2014 Seahawks, really 2013 and 2012 too, but those iterations of the Seahawks, that was the zeitgeist of like, yes, find this guy on this rookie deal and build a phenomenal team around him.

We were right in the thick of that at that time. And I also think that if you look at the drafts, right? So how many quarterbacks from the 2004 draft are in this group? Rivers, Rogers, Rothers, Rathlberger, Eli. We've talked about this a lot. There is a missing era of starting quarterbacks in the NFL that was like the 2013 through like 2015 drafts, essentially. It was like the E.J. Manual draft, the Marcus Mariotta draft. the Jamis Winston draft, those guys are no longer starting quarterbacks in the NFL.

There's an entire swath of drafts over like a three to four year period that none of those guys are currently starters in the league anymore. And so the incentives for going younger because of the money and the fact that there's an entire era of guys missing, that has pulled down the average age of quarterbacks in the NFL drastically over the last 10 years. And throw in too, not quite that draft, but the best of those guys, Andrew Luck, retired very early, Not to blame him for that, but that skews things too. When he could be, if Andrew Luck was still playing,

imagine the age that he would be in and the way that he would skew those numbers. And it would probably be him and Matthew Stafford at the upper end of like every age conversation when you're talking about starting quarterbacks in the NFL. So for him to retire, was he, how old was he when he even retired? It was 2017. And so that was nine years ago. He was 27? Yeah, he wasn't even 30 years old when he retired.

And he wasn't 30. There's no telling. Is that right? So he, no, excuse me, 2019 is when he retired. So in 2019, he would have been, he would have been like 29. Yeah, still not 30 years old. Yes, so 29, I'm sorry. It's wild to think the effect that he would have as a quarterback in that age range

if he was playing and still near the top of the league, even if he wasn't the best in the league, what that would do to those numbers. I also think it plays into the conversation we've long had, and it's been pretty popular over the last couple years just about the idea of quarter. quarterback development in the NFL and how many guys are winning between the ears compared to previous eras. And I don't even necessarily think it's a development problem. I think it's just the demographics of the quarterbacks influence that. Like as this group gets older, I do think that we'll have the same feeling about watching late career Mahomes and late career Josh Allen as we had watching late career Peyton Manning.

Like this idea that Peyton Manning was like a bag of bones who won in a cerebral way is only true later. his career. Same thing with like Drew Brees. People always talk about like Pop Gun Drew Brees and it's like dude go watch like 2009 Drew Brees. He's throwing the shit out of the football. You could even argue like even like you could argue really only 2015 and maybe 2014 Manning was a bag of bones like in 2013 he threw 55 touchdown.

But he was still, his physical skill set had deteriorated by that point. It had but like post neck injuries. But it still looked better than like what people think of when you're thinking about that final Broncos championship team. Of course, but he was a really good athlete. Like Peyton Manning and Drew's. Drew Brees were not, like, statue-esque, couldn't move pocket passers early in their career. And so I think as this group starts to get a little bit older, the current group in the NFL,

we're going to have an appreciation about the ways that they can win that are more similar to late career, Peyton Manning, late career Drew Brees. So if you'll allow me, because one of mine was similar enough to Derricks that we, let's just throw it in there. And it is just talking about the age range of quarterbacks at that time versus right now. and consequently the legacies and what has been accomplished by quarterbacks in the NFL right now. Like if you go back to 2014, these were the guys we're talking about. Peyton Manning, Tom Brady, Drew Brees, Aaron Rogers, Ben Rothlessberger, Eli Manning, throw him in there.

The guys I'm leaving out, Philip Rivers, Matt Ryan hadn't won his MVP yet, and Matthew Stafford obviously had a lot of football left to play. Most of the guys I just listed had already, like, accomplished their legacy cementing stuff. Like Aaron Rogers at that point, the first like six guys you listed off at all won Super Bowls at that point. Rogers had already won his Super Bowl

and multiple MVP's after the 2014 season. Breeze had won his Super Bowl. Manning had won his first Super Bowl. And even though Brady was about to start another run, he had won three Super Bowls. We could crystallize our opinions of these guys already, even with that much time left in their career. Now go look at it.

I'm not saying anything. revolutionary. But since the Patriots beat the Seahawks in that 2014 Super Bowl, these are the guys that have won championships. Brady, four more times. Patrick Mahomes, three times. Stafford and Peyton winning closer to the end of their career than the beginning. And then Nick Foles filling in for Carson Wins and Jalen Hertz is the closest thing you could describe to a young quarterback with a lot of his career left in front of him. Like it just, we haven't been seeing that. And so, Like so many good quarterbacks in the NFL right now, they haven't gotten there. Or if you want to be optimistic about it, they haven't written the final chapter.

And hopefully they do. But a lot of really good quarterbacks in the NFL right now who are still waiting on that moment. I think it's two things come to mind when you're saying that. One, we forget that there was a long period of time where the Patriots weren't winning Super Bowls. Yes. Right? Like I think in our minds, like the Patriots were in it every single year. It's been funny this year seeing a lot of – I worked at the Boston Globe out of college.

my first job. And so people I worked with at the globe still work at the globe. And I would see them at the Super Bowl seemingly every single year because the Patriots were in it. And then now there was a couple of year gap and now they're all back. And so that's even bringing me back to like, oh yeah, this is what the Super Bowl used to feel like. But there was a long period of time from like, what, 2012 through 2017 where the Patriots were not playing in the Super Bowl? There was a period of time where we were like, oh my God, I can't believe Eli Manning stole Brady's legacy. Like, Are they ever going to do this again? And another note I made while I was looking at this was in 2014 Brady Manning was a neck-in-neck contentious debate.

Like who's the better one? And Brady just took it and ran with it to a degree that I don't think even then you could have predicted. But that was not the case when the Patriots were getting ready to play the Seahawks in 2014. Yes, excuse me. So they... It was like after the undefeated season. Yeah. So in 2012 and 2013, they obviously missed the Super Bowl.

in 2014 they win the Super Bowl, 2015 they don't go, and then you have that run. 2016, 2017, 2018, that's when they go three years in a row. And so for the most part, like, the only times they went between the undefeated season and then 2014 was 2011. Yeah, they lost in Indy. There was, like, a significant stretch where a lot of other teams were winning championships, and that just hasn't happened over the last 10 years.

And I think the other part of it, one of the other things that comes to mind is, whenever, this is why I always do the lessons from the Final Four show, not lessons from the teams that won the Super Bowl, because the teams that win the Super Bowl is an extremely small group. And especially over the last 10 years, the only teams winning Super Bowls essentially were Patrick Mahomes and Tom Brady. So what can you really learn if that's always going to be your North Star? And so I think that's also why it's a little bit misleading to only look at the teams that are winning because the teams that were winning over the last 10 years were quarterbacked by two very specific guys. All right, so my first one here, I had the age of the quarterbacks. There aren't a ton of 2014 is right before we start getting some of the next-gen stuff. And so things like coverages, box counts, all of that.

Even PFF doesn't have those numbers going back that far. And so I think anecdotally, we probably understand that the league was a lot more single high back then. It was a lot more cover three back then. Gus Bradley was the coach of the Jaguars by 2014. The next year, Dan Quinn would become the head coach of the football. Falcons and so you started to see the Legion of Boom effect take over the league in like in this era but we don't have a lot of numbers on that one schematic thing that we do have information on and I do think it's really important even when you compare it to this Super Bowl the league in 2014

46 and a half percent nickel according to true media 46 and a half percent this year 59 percent so we look that up too we go from being slightly less than 50 percent to being 60 percent. And if you add in all the dime snaps, it's even further in this direction. I did it the opposite where I just looked up like base. And so what were the base numbers? So in base, it went from 2014. It was 38 and a half percent and it dropped to 29.8 percent. So like a 10 percent drop in how often anybody is playing base. And I think that also like you see that in the numbers, but you also see it in the way we talk about it. Like we added nickel to like all proteins and stuff. Like we added a position to the way that we talk about the game. So the amount of nickel that people are

playing the prominence of that position. But then the other thing I was looking at was the body types of guys who were playing in the nickel. And so in 2014, I just looked up the top 25 guys in slot snaps on Pro Football on PFF. Four of the top 25 guys in 2014 were six foot or taller. This year, 13 of the top 25 guys in total slot snaps on defense were six foot or taller. And that's not even including guys like Jalen Petrie who are 511 but weigh 205. Right. And so if you did 205 or 6 foot, it's just drastically different. Like when you look at the guys who were getting a ton of slot snaps in 2014,

it was like Captain Munnerland, right? Like those are the types of guys that were at the top of those lists. It's wild to think we're not that far removed from like when you're scouting cornerbacks or talking about draft prospects at cornerback. It's like, oh, he was good for his college team, but his arms are 29 and 7, 8 inches long. Like, he'll be a nickel. And it's just like, yep, you're not good enough to do it outside in the pros. So we're just going to move you to the nickel.

You're too big. You're too small. Yeah, yeah. And so, like, even as recently as like probably 16, 17, 18, people talked that way, where it's just like, well, we're just, we'll move you to nickel because that's where you can play in the NFL. And look where we are now. and it is this highly specialized skill set, and guys have gotten bigger,

and you are prioritizing, looking for them. And I think we've mentioned it before. It's going to, it's going to turbo charge from here, in my opinion, with the success that some of these teams have had, where everybody is going to be hunting this type of player rather than being like, I don't know what to do with you. Can you play nickel? Like, that's just not the way we talk about it anymore.

And it's because when everybody into like 2014, even up until like, this didn't really start to turn into like 2019, 2020, when we got a lot more of the, the offensive started to change a little bit. But you could be a little bit lighter at the nickel when you were loading the box. And like you had a heavier strong safety he was going to be in the box for you and stuff like that where you just had the body count. So that guy was a free fitter sometimes.

And it didn't really matter that he was a little bit lighter. Now if you're going to be teams like specifically the Seahawks, you kind of need your big body nickel to be able to defend the run. Same thing with like Kyle Hamilton. Like all these team, Cooper DeGine is really good at it. Jalen Petrie is really good at it. Like they have to be part of the run fit consistently. they have to be able to take space and not just like tackle every now and then.

That's a huge reason why it's like that's why it's so tied to the too high movement is like, well, if you're going to lose bodies in the box, they need to still have like weight in the box. If you look at the two high numbers even from like 2016 compared to 2021, 2021 is the first year that the league was more than 50% starting from two high shells. And so, but if you look back at like 2016, which I'm sure it was even more pronounced in 2014, we're talking about like 42%, 43%, and so that has been a drastic change, even if we don't have the number specifically from 2014, and it's playing into, again, the types of bodies that we're seeing in those nickel looks.

All right, before we move on, we're going to take a quick break. All right, Derek, what's your next one? Your next lesson or next difference from the 2014 NFL compared to this one? I did have one that is actually a little bit tied to that in terms of the types of coverages we're getting, and I think this is partly related to the nickel. So if you look at, I think when we all imagine, like, the single high versus the two high world, a lot of it is like, well, they just put a ton more cover three back in, like, 2014 and 15. And that's a little bit true.

But teams still play a lot of it now because it's a nice base call. You can play it on everything. It's a really good, like, simulated pressure look, or if you're bringing five, whatever it is. It's still the most popular. Right, exactly. It's still the most productive. Like, if you look at the percentage, it's still the most popular coverage in the NFL. A hundred percent.

The difference is that nobody plays man anymore. And part of that is when you had smaller nickels, when the guy's 511-190, well, yeah, he can run with anybody. When you have a Nick Eminwarian, he's like 6-2-2-10, it's like he can run with some guys in certain matchups. But you just don't want to necessarily put that guy in man coverage all the time. And so I looked at like early down cover one back in. Where did you find this? So I couldn't go all the way back to 2014.

This only goes back to 2019. But again, this I still think feels very like similar to, I don't think we got that change until like 20-21 like you're talking about. Digging for 2014 Aeros stats was... It was hard. There's really nowhere you can turn. That's why I was curious. Some of like anecdotally like trying to mesh it with what I got from as close as I could get.

So I got to 2019 and early down cover one in 2019 on average was 27.6. And you got a ton of teams that were like above 40%. And this year in 2025 that was 14.9%. And you hardly got anybody like over 25% because it's a lot of these teams with bigger bodies that just don't have nickels that can run. Really, the only team, even if you look beyond early downs, the only team that ran a more than 30% cover one or man coverage at all this year was the Browns.

And it's because they still have smaller, lighter corners. Like that's how they had built the room. Most other teams just aren't built that way anymore, and so they can't really play that way. So it's funny, we were on a somewhat similar wavelength. Man and blitzing are obviously tied together, right? And so those numbers we do have for 2014 compared to 2025. So I was looking that up.

In 2014, you had 14 teams that had above a 30% blitz rate in the NFL. 14. This year, there was seven. So literally half. And the league-wide blitz average is down about 3% in now compared to 2014. But that number is skewed because you still have teams like the Vikings that are blitzing on like 48% of snaps. And so there are still enough teams that are doing it. an extreme level where the overall league averages aren't that much different, but when you look at

how many blitz heavy teams there are. We got three teams doing a lot of lifting. Exactly. Exactly. So there are half as many teams blitzing on 30% of their snaps in 20, 25 as there were in 2014. I'm trying to, like, in the moment, think of the catalyst for that. And it's, I mean, it's just teams not trusting themselves to generate. I think it's just you're making it. pressure in that way. You're making it easier on offense. You're going to get yourself eaten alive. Yeah. It was, they lived in, and Nate was really good at this term. It was like a gash or

be gash world in like 2018, 2019 when some of the zone stuff really started to take off. It was like, well, some of these teams to Shanahan's McVease, they were like, well, if you're going to be in heavy boxes all the time and you're going to be in man coverage all the time and you're just going to throw bodies, we're just going to like block it up on this play action stuff and we're just going to hit you over the top consistently because we we know what we're getting. And I think it's all, again,

tied to when you're playing more single high and you're playing more man, you're just going to be blitzing more. That's just the nature of the sport at that point. And the other small part of it, too, like, think about, like, in, from, like, 2014 to, like, 2019, how many more of the defensive guys permeated around the league were Belichick guys? Yeah. It was guys who were blitzing and playing man, whereas, like, we just don't really pick from those trees quite as much anymore.

That is a really, and I'm going to touch on something related to that in a minute. but the Belichick trees influence on the lead and how that has shifted to other coaching trees and other coaching philosophies here over the last four or five years. So while you guys were talking, I was just curious. I was looking up some of the coaches that were coordinating some of these blitz-heavy defenses in 2014. So the Rams had the number one blitz rate in the NFL in 2014.

It was like 44%. Greg Williams was the Rams defensive coordinator. Third on the list, the Arizona Cardinals. Who is the Arizona Cardinals? coordinator in 2014. Todd Bulls. Todd Bowles. And so we have some of the very familiar blitz-heavy characters from that era are guys that have been the blitz-heavy characters in the NFL over the last, like, decade and a half. I'm just on a, like, post-college early career acid trip right now, like hearing some of these names. So the other one, the last one, the Packers were also in the top five.

Dom Capers was the defensive coordinator for the Packers in 2014. So all of those dudes from that era, who were like the heavy pressure guys. That was still very prevalent in 2014 in a way that now it feels like more of an outlier. Dave, what's your next one? Actually, it's a perfect dovetail for what I wanted to talk about. This is the first thing I thought about when I heard we were going to do this show

because 2014 was such an interesting coaching matchup because it's Belichick. He's been the coach of the Patriots for 15 years by that point, longer, I guess. He'd been the head coach of other NFL organizations, however briefly, the guy won Super Bowls in the 80s with the Giants and coached the Browns. Pete Carroll was an NFL head coach in the 90s, created a college dynasty, won a Super Bowl, had done all of this. So it's like two of the biggest, most successful names in coaching.

Pete Carroll was 63 and Bill Belichick was 62, head coaching that game. Now think about the matchup we're getting on Sunday. Mike McDonald is 38 years old, not very far removed from just being a college D.C. And Mike Vrable, obviously, he's got the bona fides as an NFL player. So it's not surprising that he would kind of fast track his way to a position like this, but he's still at the age of 51 on his second head coaching job in the NFL. And so I'm just struck by the difference in coaching age and coaching experience over the last decade. And I went back and looked at it.

The average age of the NFL head coach in 2014 was 56 in 2025. And I used coaches heading into the 25 season. Obviously, it's changed with the amount of turnover. It's gotten younger. It has. It's got significantly younger. It was 49 heading into the season. And so almost a decade.

It's almost a decade of difference in head coaching experience. And I broke it down by age, too. Ironically, the number of 60-plus-year-old head coaches is similar. and I reason that out by saying, okay, well, if you want a steady hand, if you want somebody with that level of experience, if John Harbaugh is your cup of tea, what you're looking for, then maybe you hire that guy. But in 2014, there were 20 head coaches between the ages of 50 and 60.

In 2025, seven. That's crazy. Like the middle-aged NFL head coach is not a thing. You are either a 60-year-old lifer or a 38 to 44-year-old. year old young gun that's what it is so i had a very similar one to this and i had different numbers but the exact same thought process and i there were 10 coaches that were 57 or older in 2014 there are five now and so it's just drastically different and if you look at this current cycle how many younger than 40 coaches just got hired clinkubiak michael flor i actually no i i i went back and

looked to account for 2026 um so the age if you account for the new hires It's 40. The average age drops down another year to 48. And even though the average is not indicative of the actual makeup because of what you're saying, it's on the polls. So there are like 40 or younger, there are at least like 6 to 8 guys. It's everybody except for the legacy guys. Like the Andy Reid's, the Harbaugh, all that. So right now, I'm looking at it right now.

Shane Steichen is 40. He turns 41 in May. Kevin O'Connell is 40. He turns 41 in May. Liam Cohen is 40. Sean McVeigh is 40. Ben Johnson turns 40 in May. Mike McDonald is 38.

Kellyn Moore is 38, or turns 38 in May. Will Flore is younger than 40. Clint Kubiak is younger than 40. You know how many younger than 40 head coaches there were in 2014? Zero. None. Mike Tomlin was the youngest one. He was 43.

There were only two head coaches in the NFL in 2014, younger than 45. Tomlin and who? It was Mike Tomlin and Bill O'Brien, who was 45 at the time. Those are the two. It's just we live in That to me Is the biggest difference about the league now I think so what the league was in 2014

It just it was unfathomable to Put your trust in a guy with who was that young And who had that little experience Obviously it's crazy to think 2014 was still a few years before McVeigh And like a few years before this whole thing Really kickstarted in earnest And I mean the effect is undeniable

I mean Sean McVeigh is the most influential person and how the NFL operates now compared to 10 years ago. Since Bill Belichick? Since I started covering the league, no one has influenced what the NFL looks like more than Sean McVeigh. And I think that they're both good and bad things associated with that, but we're still seeing it.

We talked about it with this coaching cycle. Was this going to be the year where because the offensive pool of guys have been picked so clean, were we going to see more defensive coaches get some of these jobs because they were more qualified? The answer is no. I mean, there were 10 openings this offseason. Six of them went to offensive coaches.

Three of them went to defensive coaches. One went to a CEO coach in John Harbaugh. So we had twice as many offense compared to defense, even as we admit that the offensive pool has been completely fished over. And if you look at the makeup, not just in terms of age with the coaches in 2014, there are 21 offensive head coaches in the NFL right now with an offensive background. there are, I think, 10 or 11 defense or CEO types. In 2014, it was 17 offensive versus 15 defense.

So it was essentially 50-50. And even the types of guys who were offensive head coaches at that time, so he took over as an interim for Dennis Allen. But three of the offensive head coaches in the NFL in 2014 were former offensive line coaches. Really? Who were they? Doug Morone, Joe Philbin, Tony Sparano, Jr. Yeah, okay. So even then when you had offense-centric guys, and then Andy Reid is another one, by the way,

even then when you had offense-centric guys, they were still like this gruff football guy, like I am what you understand a head coach to be. So even the fact that it's 17 offensive guys is still not indicative of how different the offensive coaches feel now compared to what they were 11 years ago. Well, and even then it's like the makeup of like what, kinds of play callers we were even hiring in that next like three to four year period after 2015, Doug Peterson goes to the Eagles, Ben McAdoo with the Giants, Matt Nagy eventually with the Bears. That like four year run after 2014, it's a lot of the West Coast guys. It's a lot of like

people seeing like, oh, Andy Reid's doing some good stuff. And like, so even as we were trying to get some more of these play callers, it was like, well, we still think the West Coast style of thing is the way to do it. And it wasn't really until like 2019 that we started to get more of the like, obviously by then McVeigh had become and really established that. And then his trees, Shanahan's trees just started getting plucked. It was like Zach Taylor, Matt Lafleur, Arthur Smith in 21, who had obviously worked with Matt LaFleur, Kevin O'Connell in 2022. A third of the league has some sort of tie to McVeigh and Shanahan.

Like the head coaching hires. It's crazy. Yeah. And I think that will continue to happen. All right, Derek, what's your next one? We've talked a little bit about just like some of the coverages and stuff that a lot of these teams are doing and how much base that we're playing and all this stuff. But like to bring it back to this game,

specifically. I think it is interesting. We already talked about teams are playing way more nickel playing way less base. I think even as that was true in like 2021, 2021, as we started trickling to that,

there weren't that many teams that had like fully abandoned base as a concept. Like Sean McDermott had done it a little bit, but for the most part, teams just weren't doing that. You look at the Seahawks specifically when they were the Legion of Boom in 2014,

they ran base 41.6% of the time. Mike McDonald's team is at 6.2. this year. And that's just like it's such a, to completely abandon it, I think is such a bizarre thing that we've gotten to at this point where I think so much of what happens with the ebbs and flows of scheme and stuff in the league is that teams push something to such an extreme that eventually it has to come back the other way. And I'm sure in two to three years from now we'll be talking about the idea of like completely abandoning base as like a bad idea. Like offenses will probably have adjusted by then and there will probably be some sort of change to that. And I think that-

to a place where teams will have what they think is their version of EMOAR where they can defend it, and you'll have learned the wrong lessons from what the Seahawks are. Exactly. Which is what happened with the Legion of Boom? Is teams like, oh, just get the tall and long corners and you can figure it out? And like, that's not secret sauce as the Legion of Boos. Teams are going to have, they're going to find a 220-pound nickel who's actually not that versatile, who's a little bit too stiff, who can't do all the things you need him to do.

And then, I mean, this is the best example of this is like the Brandon Staley Chargers, right? where you are trying to have the same ideas that powered what is the new meta defensively in the NFL, but you don't have the component parts to see through those ideas. And I think teams are going to look at, well, if we just get a big nickel player, then we'll be able to just play a nickel to everything, not going back and watching Byron Murphy take on double teams this year. And so that's if we could like... Yeah, I mean, Nick Em and Worry is incredible,

but there's a lot more going on here than just him being a great young player. That's the thing. Like Nick M. Worry is cool and he's great, but so much of what actually fuels, like, how they can fit the run and all this stuff is like, well, yeah, Byron Murphy and Leonard Williams can be two gaps away if they want to at the line, at the snap. Their edges are so long and they can hold space in a way that other guys can't. Ernest Jones is like the best fixer in the league as a middle line.

Like, they have so many other things that make it work. And to your point, somebody's going to make the wrong mistake of, oh, we're just going to take this 220-pound hammerhead safety. We're going to ask him to start running with guys from the nickel. And it's like, that just... Problem solved. Yeah, I don't know. about that guys. I don't know about that. And then teams are going to do exactly what the Rams did.

They're going to line up in jumbo or 13 personnel and they're going to look at that and be like, we're going to run for six yards to carry because you can't stop this. And I think it's funny because even the Seahawks ran into that last year where they tried to play a certain way based on the way that Mike McDonald wants to play and they didn't have the horses to do it. If you look at their run defense over the first half of the 2024 season out of those two high looks, it was abysmal. Like they could not stop the run playing structurally how he wanted to play last year in Seattle. They needed to go out and get an Ernest Jones. They needed Byron Murphy to take this step. And so even the team that perfected it by this season was still bad at it as recently as last season.

I needed to hear this as I get ready to spend draft season hunting for Nick Emmen-Wory body types. I needed this reminder. It's never as simple as one thing. It's never just the one thing. And I think, similar to the long corners, I think we will inevitably have teams that learn the wrong lessons from what the Seahawks are. All right, before we move on, we're going to take one more quick break. All right, Dave, you have one or two more? I've got one more. And it was the second thing that came to my mind other than coaches, which is think about how decision-making has changed in the league over the last decade. I was hoping somebody was going to do this because I forgot to look up the numbers.

I've got you. And, I mean, I've got quite a few. but in totality NFL teams in 2014 made a go-for-it decision on 12% of fourth downs. It's double that right now. Wow. I mean that is the that's the nut graph right there like that is

cutting to the chase. Absolutely. Teams are going for it twice as often a decade later as they used to but you can break it down I mean in the red zone I wanted to look up manageable distances in the red zone fourth and one to like fourth and sixth NFL teams in 2025 were going for it 63% of the time. What was it in 2014? 31. Yeah.

It's more than half. Twice. You can see it's like a 15 to 30% jump across everything. I even, you bump the distance up to fourth and two. So it's a little bit less of a sure thing. You kind of take sneaks out of it, take the tush push away. Still 31% in 2025, the Charmin, the Charmin bear walking past us in the middle of this conversation. That is, that's what the Super Bowl is all about.

Trying to keep focus while doing these shows as everything happens around you is a real skill. Even if you bump it up to fourth and two, so it's not a sneak and it's not a gimmy, 31% this year, 11% in 2014. So three times as much. Go into the open field. I wanted to look up what the distance was. I used the plus 28 to the plus 25. So a makeable field goal, but not a guaranteed field goal.

Fourth and one to fourth and six, 47% this year, 33% in 2014. 48% if you bump it back to like around the logo. 48% this year, 21% in 2014. I mean double and triple the amount of times NFL teams are willing to go for it a decade later. The most interesting thing about this is there's one team in the league that didn't buy into this in 2025. And it's the Seahawks. They did not go for it on fourth down very often. They've got the barnyard.

They do their sneak with A.J. Barner on occasion. The Seattle Seahawks went for it on fourth down just 24th down. 12 times this year, which is easily the lowest number. It's like an exception that proves the rule thing where I think a lot of times in like 2014, the conventional wisdom was like, oh, our defense will hold. And it's like that doesn't really work if you have the ninth best defense. When you have one of the best defenses of all time, the Seahawks are built.

They're built to play more conservatively if that's what they want to do. But I also don't think he wants to do that. Like if you hear Mike McDonald talk about it, that isn't like something that he wants to be like ingrained in his DNA as a head coach, I think they just kind of accidentally were that this year. Well, now offensive lines not really good enough for that necessarily. Like, you can understand how they arrive there, given what they have. Here's what I'll say.

Even if the Seahawks defense is as good next year as it was this year, I don't think that they will be at the bottom of the league in the amount of times they're going for. Well, Mike McDonald, and he talked about it sometime during this whole run-up to the game, he talked about his analytics guy who was the one that was in his year about using the timeouts early against Indianapolis. You remember that sequence? He's got those people giving him advice. It's not like Mike McDonald is ignoring the analytic revolution in the NFL.

I don't think he's a conservative, defensive-minded, we got to play small-bow coach. Think back to that moment in the NFC championship game where they're throwing the ball in those situations with three minutes left. Again, that's why I don't, there are some coaches like Mike Tom won over the last few years where Todd Bowles before they made him start going forward on Fort Down. They don't want to do this. I don't think Mike McDonald is one of those people who doesn't want to do it. I think, and he's said as much this year, he's like, that's not the plan. Like, we just kind of stumbled into this version of ourselves this year. In 2014, 29 of 32 NFL teams went for it on fourth down less than 20 times on the year.

The Bears led the league in fourth down attempts that year with 28. Cutting edge. The Josh McCown, Chicago Bears led the league. Mark Trussman, visionary. In 2025, 31 of 32 teams went for it on fourth down 20 or more times. times Carolina led the league with 43. So like it is, the numbers are staggering. Riverboat round.

Every, yes, something like that. Every single team in the league, with the exception of this year Seahawks, is doing this shit on a regular basis. In most cases, they're not even thinking that hard about it. And when you think back to a decade ago, I mean, we knew all of this was going on, but it's just stark to compare the numbers. It really is. And you mentioning like the stuff around midfield, that those are the moments to me

that the red zone, I just, it feels less stark for some reason. To me, it's like the idea of you have the ball, it's fourth and one on the minus 47, you're going for it now. It's just like an understood part of how the game goes. And back then, I think it would have been surprising to watch a team go for it in its own territory in those situations. And I do think now because of the way the kickoff works, if you lose the ball on the plus 20, it's just like, well, that's there further to their own end zone than they would be if we kick the ball.

to them. Whereas now, if you do lose the ball on the plus 45, like, that does suck. Like, you should still go for it, obviously. You want to hold the ball, but like, you're giving up a lot more. It is really cool that Belichick was the famous early example of this, that famous 06 game, where he went for it on fourth and short in his own territory and broke the brains of the football establishment. But I don't even know if he saw it going where it is today, where, like, that would still be seen as a bold decision, but I think it would be very, very, quickly rationalized by people who are paying attention to football. My last one, just talking about, I think McVeigh has been extremely influential in how

the league is different. I think the other person, you could lump all three of them together. What the 2017 and 2018 quarterback drafts did for how we think about quarterbacks and what you need from your quarterbacks, like the trio of what Josh Allen, Patrick Mahomes, and Lamar Jackson have done for the skill sets that we're seeking out, the players that we're seeking out. And the number I think that best reflects this. In 2014, league-wide, there was a 3.7% scramble rate. This year, it was 5.6%. So that uptick isn't that high, but in 2014, there were three teams with a scramble rate above 7%. Three. Two of those teams are quarterback by Colin

Kaepernick and Russell Wilson. In 2025, there were 10 teams with quarterbacks that had a scramble rate above 7%. So we've gone from a place where you have outlier quarterbacks that are these mobile guys who can make stuff happen deeper into the down to now a third of the league is filled with those sorts of players. And the guy, Drake May. Like Drake May would be an outlier in 2014. Now it's just kind of how we understand top five quarterbacks to be. Well now Matthew Stafford only having like one rushing yard the entire year. That feels like the outlier. Whereas like, yeah, 10 years ago, that just felt like, Well, yeah, all the other good 35-year-old quarterbacks, they just don't move. They just beat you from the pocket that Drew Brees, Peyton Manning, whoever it was.

I mean, I don't want to speak in absolutes, but it starts to feel after a certain point that that level of athleticism is a prerequisite to being drafted that highly. Like the first guy that comes to mind that doesn't fit that would be Jared Gough. So I did a story. And that was 10 years ago. That was 10 years ago, yeah. I did a story for The Ringer in, I was right. before I left The Ringer. So it's probably 2019, 2020. And it was about this idea, about how we've gotten to a place where this level of athleticism and mobility for quarterbacks is almost a prerequisite

for being drafted in the top five. And I think it might have been Jordan Palmer, who said to me, and it's in the story, it's on the record. He said, Jared Golf will be the last guy without that level of athleticism that gets drafted number one overall. And it's like, I guess the question is, how do you feel like, where does Fernando Mendoza fit into all this? is he is like a he's a better athlete than Jared Gough. Like Fernando Mendoza has a level of mobility. I mean, if you saw his famous fourth down play in the national title game, like Fernando Mendoza is not Caleb or Jaden Daniels,

but he can do those sorts of things. And it's this, I mean, Darnold and Joe Burrow fits that description as well. Yeah, Joe Burrow feels like that's the most analogous case, like Mendoza's athletic. Yeah, I would agree with that. So it's, it has very much changed in that way, where we have these, like, statue-esque pocket passers in 2016 that are still going number one overall.

And those guys just... And it's almost just because those guys don't really exist anymore. We don't make them anymore. Yes. Like, we just have a different type of athlete that's playing quarterback. And I think, again, the same way that the coaching pool is influenced by, like, what the McVeigh guys have done, I think the quarterback pool has been influenced by what the Mahomes-Allen-Lamara-Jackson trio

has, like, how it's reshaped the position. Well, and it's like we talked about how the sport has changed 20 years ago, high schools and colleges realize that having the best athlete have the ball in his hands on every single play is probably the best way to do it. And so the NFL is always there's always going to be some sort of catch up period, especially with how long we had some of those good pocket passing vets in the league. But we're now at a point where it's like those are kind of the only guys that even get a chance to play quarterback anymore. Matthew Stafford is like a weird relic of a different era. Yes. It's very fun to watch, but it is a relic of a different era.

All right. That is all we've got for today. We will be back tomorrow with our big blowout Super Bowl preview. Very much looking forward to that. We're going to have video stuff coming your guys' way all throughout this week. Into the next couple weeks, we're banking a bunch of stuff, doing a bunch of telestration with players. Derek talked to Fred Warner yesterday, not while wearing that costume, which is very upsetting to me. But we're going to have a lot of that stuff coming your guys' way.

Please, if you have not, check out the merch store. We have Athletic Football Show merch now. The link to the merch store is available in the show description below. So I encourage you guys to check that out. If you have not subscribed to the Athletic Football Show YouTube page, now is the time to do it. So please be on the lookout for a bunch of more stuff coming your guys away this week. For now, that's all we got. Appreciate you listening.

We'll talk to you soon.