Paper Lions, Hot Dogs, Pedagogy and Movies! Mailbag Part 2
Just a typical Too Deep Zone mailbag: completion percentages, kickers, television contracts, condiments and a discussion of what high school cafeteria duty is like.
Welcome to Part 2 of the summer mailbag, where we tackle your more esoteric questions. Thanks as always for your contributions!
Sorry if this is a s**t question: What are the chances of the completion percentage record being broken next year? 2024 produced like 10 of the top 100 all time seasons and a few of the top 10. Are total percentages increasing? Does this reflect a league-wide groupthink/ new orthodoxy (short passes are today’s ground-and-pound; Kliff Kingsbury is Chuck Knox). And finally, how does it portend aesthetically? – Andy
This is, in fact, an excellent question!
The 2024 season produced five of the top 20 seasons in NFL history in completion percentage:
3. Tua Tagovailoa: 72.9%
4. Jared Goff: 72.4%
7. Baker Mayfield: 71.4%
10. Joe Burrow: 70.6%
14. Geno Smith: 70.4%
Drew Brees holds the first, second, fifth and eighth-highest single-season completion rates in history, and is also tied for 10th and 13th. There have only been 24 seasons in NFL history in which a starting quarterback has completed 70-plus percent of his passes. Brees is responsible for seven of those 24 seasons. Twelve others were by currently-active quarterbacks, assuming we count Derek Carr (temporarily retired) and Deshaun Watson (whatever) as active.
The league-wide completion rate in 2024 was 65.3%, an all-time high. For comparison’s sake, Kurt Warner led the NFL with a rate of 65.1% in 1999.
Receiver screens, RPOs and other popular tactics are currently juicing completion rates like never before. Kyle Shanahan, Ben Johnson and Mike McDaniel keep finding new ways to boost efficiency through short completions and YAC. The proliferation of Shanahan and Sean McVay impersonators around the league has indeed fostered groupthink of a sort, though it’s worth noting that these coaches and schemes are only gaining traction because they work.
Coaches, coordinators and quarterbacks also know that short completions make stats look pretty while keeping sacks and turnovers low. Risk aversion, even as it starts to reach the tipping point of diminishing returns, keeps everyone employed AND healthy. A coach like Bruce Arians could buck the risk-reward trend, but not long after Arians retired, his protege Byron Leftwich got replaced by McVay guys.
I feel like there’s an upper asymptote for completion rates somewhere south of 75%. At some point, not only do deeper, lower-percentage throws become necessary to win most games, but batted passes, throwaways and drops start to be a limiting factor. If someone does reach 75%, it may be more of a Geno Smith dumping off a million flat passes in a so-so offense than someone like Goff taking some chances in the name of competing for the Super Bowl.
Aesthetics are in the eye of the beholder, but wins are always more aesthetically pleasing than losses. If a tactic produces victories, fans will learn to love it.
The relative importance of placekicking in football bothers me. It’s just so oddly random and unrelated to real football-type plays, yet it actually decides many games.
Is there anything like it in any other sport? Where strong, fast and athletic players play one game, and then a little fella comes in and a completely different game is played (for one play) to decide who wins.
It’s the only reason goalposts exist. Only three players really decide whether the play is successful or not (instead of 22), and all three are usually specialists who almost never play otherwise.
It’s just weird. – Sheepnado
Now that you mention it, placekicking is a little like having a water polo match decided by someone on the side of the pool hitting free throws at the end.
I cannot think of any other examples quite like modern placekicking. The Tour de France is around the corner, and non-mountainous cycling stages often consist of one huge blob of riders staying together for four hours before the “sprinters” (who were surrounded by teammates protecting them from the wind all day) actually go full-tilt for the final mile or so. But at least the sprinters cycled the full course. For the kicking analogy to work, they’d have to ride around in the repair car, then hop out down the stretch.
In early football, the kicker was a position player, not a specialist. By the 1920s, the team’s best player was usually the star kicker, so Red Grange or Dutch Clark was often the guy trying to win the game with a late extra point or field goal. If Patrick Mahomes or Saquon Barkley were the guy lining up for the 50-yarder with two seconds left, it would look no stranger to us than, say, penalty kicks in soccer. Even if Harrison Butker or Brrandon Aubrey were forced to play safety or tight end as well as kicker, their sudden importance would be no more unusual than the sharpshooting guard brought off the bench to get hacked and shoot free throws late in a basketball game.
(Go back far enough in football history, and a touchdown was not worth any points; it only set up an easy kicking “try.” The goalposts, in their various forms, are therefore much older than innovations like the forward pass.)
Specialist kickers evolved rather gradually. They have now been with us for nearly 50 years. It’s weird when looked at from the outside, but I have never lived in a world where things were done differently, so it just seems natural!
It feels like the NFL lost the "work smarter not harder" memo some time ago (Cam Ward is in the building at 5 AM! And he's convinced all the receivers to join him!). Is there something about the rote nature of the basic installation that lends itself to a more-is-better approach and this actually is one of the more effective ways to deal with it? Or is this just more performative BS that becomes "news" since there's not much else of substance going on? – Tim Williams
Football had a grindset culture long before we coined a term for a “grindset culture.” There’s a self-fulfilling prophecy and Survivor Bias at work when someone like Ward starts showing up at the facility at dawn: college athletes become starting quarterbacks and top picks by exhibiting such hyper-dedicated behaviors to their coaches at lower levels. Unless they are overwhelmingly talented or their dad is the coach.
NFL coaches have taken the grindset to illogical extremes for decades: sleeping in the office, forcing 20-hour days from their assistants, turning everyone into sleep-deprived paranoiacs who cripple themselves with analysis paralysis. But I don’t see anything wrong with an eager young leadership type burning the midnight oil.