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League Passing Average: 1932-Today

grandy

Senior Member
Joined
Aug 4, 2011
Messages
11,640
The other thread had me intrigued as far as passing stats by era. I made some graphs to account for league averages over all seasons. This is per game, I mainly did it this way to account for changes in season length as well as strike shortened seasons.

Data Source: http://www.pro-football-reference.com/years/NFL/passing.htm

TDs per Game
bf01m0.jpg


Ints per Game
oaonf4.jpg


Passing Attempts per Game
mv3ymd.jpg


Completion Percentage
11v7a79.jpg


Yards per Game
hs6cz9.jpg


Yards per Attempt
28bu0j4.jpg


Sacks per Game (Note: Records weren't kept until 1949)
2cs6ps5.jpg
 
Cool shit Grandy. TDs per game only recently spiked. Good job competition committee you'll show them no one likes defense.
 
What really surprised me was that the highest league average YPA came in 1962 with 7.9
 
Nice info. Completion % is one long increase..steadily.

Yep...lots of factors into that one too. The introduction of the west coast offenses utilized shorter horizontal passing routes rather than down the field patterns. Much easier to complete those shorter passes. It's only evolved from the Bill Walsh days.

Also defenses can't touch receivers anymore, so makes it hard to defend any type of passing attack. Sometimes I wonder just how awesome somebody like Johnny Unitas would have been playing in today's league.
 
Yep...lots of factors into that one too. The introduction of the west coast offenses utilized shorter horizontal passing routes rather than down the field patterns. Much easier to complete those shorter passes. It's only evolved from the Bill Walsh days.

Also defenses can't touch receivers anymore, so makes it hard to defend any type of passing attack. Sometimes I wonder just how awesome somebody like Johnny Unitas would have been playing in today's league.

Or Mel Blount. Dude use to kill receivers, when the NFL makes new rules for safety..it think they had Mel Blount in mind.
 
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Still showing for me, even tested in a private browsing window. Maybe tinypic is blocked or something?
 
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