Record made to be broken
The bar on NFL passing yardage keeps moving.
The year is 2027. Late in the third quarter of Detroit’s game in London, Matthew Stafford, in his 19th consecutive season quarterbacking the Lions, whips the ball toward a teammate darting across the middle. The receiver catches it in stride, eluding a defender reaching for the flag dangling from his hip, for a 20-yard gain, and the Lions race onto the field to mob Stafford.
They’re congratulating him for becoming the NFL’s career leader in passing yardage.
Yes, this — well, probably not the flag part — could really happen.
“I’d say, ‘Hell no,’” Darren Woodson, a former All-Pro safety, said recently when posed with such a possibility. “Matthew Stafford? It doesn’t fit the mold of greatness.”
That standard, Woodson continued, applies only to a certain subset of quarterbacks — retired legends like Brett Favre and Peyton Manning or current luminaries like Drew Brees of the New Orleans Saints. Entering Monday night’s game against Washington, with another 201 yards, Brees, who has thrown for 71,740, would vault past Favre and then Manning, a son of New Orleans, into first place.
It will have taken Brees 18 seasons to establish a record that has stood for less than three and that will inevitably fall again. Brees will merely be a caretaker, the consequence of a passing revolution that has transformed the record books, forever altering how greatness is perceived around the league.
A series of rule changes across the last 40 years, and more acutely over the last 20, has fueled offensive innovations that have ushered the NFL to a juncture where quarterbacks are throwing more often, and for more yards, and completing a greater percentage of their passes, than in any other season. Through four weeks, more than half the starting quarterbacks — 18 of 32 — are on a pace to throw for more than 4,000 yards, with four in line to smash Manning’s single-season record of 5,477: Derek Carr, Kirk Cousins, Jared Goff and Ben Roethlisberger.
Five of the league’s top eight career leaders in passing yardage, including Brees, are active, and though it is doubtful that any will wind up surpassing him, it is unavoidable that someone else — consistent yardage monsters like Stafford and Matt Ryan of the Atlanta Falcons, who, like Brees, have thrived playing home games indoors, or even an emerging star like Goff of the Rams or Patrick Mahomes of the Kansas City Chiefs — will.
All of 30 years old, Stafford has reached 20,000, 25,000 and 30,000 yards faster than any other NFL quarterback, bombing away without much of a running game — or, on average, a strong defense — supporting him. His record as a starter is 61-68.
“It’s a pride that you can point to, but if you point too long, somebody’s going to go right by you,” said Hall of Fame quarterback Dan Fouts, now an analyst for CBS, who threw for more than 4,000 yards in 1979, 1980 and 1981. “I’m sure (Fran) Tarkenton thought his numbers would stand forever, and Favre and Peyton, and right down the list. Their numbers shouldn’t be discounted, because they’re tremendous accomplishments. But the way the game is headed, they’re probably not going to last.”
Fouts played most of his career for Don Coryell, the pioneering San Diego Chargers coach who orchestrated a lethal downfield passing offense by spreading multiple receivers out wide. When he retired in 1987, Fouts ranked second to Tarkenton on the career list, staying there until 1994, when Dan Marino of the Miami Dolphins topped him. Now? Fouts is 16th.
“A dollar in 1963 isn’t worth what a dollar is now,” said John Turney, a prominent football historian. “Same as in passing yards.”
When Mike Martz broke into the NFL in 1992 as the Los Angeles Rams’ quarterbacks coach, he said the head coach, Chuck Knox, wanted two running backs and a tight end in the game unless it was third down. “That was the mentality,” said Martz, who coordinated the record-setting offense of what became the St. Louis Rams, which were known as the Greatest Show on Turf, and now coaches the San Diego Fleet of the Alliance of American Football. “Now on first down, you can be in five receivers, who knows. All bets are off. Anything’s a go if you can do it.”
Woodson also entered the league in 1992, before officials called illegal contact with regularity. His coach, Jimmy Johnson, ordered the Dallas Cowboys’ defensive backs to be physical with receivers, and Woodson interpreted that edict to the extreme. “I’m getting my hands on him, damn near dragging him,” Woodson said in a telephone interview. “Back then, we grabbed guys all the time 20 yards down the field. And they wouldn’t call it.”
He reflects on those days when chatting at ESPN, where he works as an analyst, with peers like Hall of Famer Steve Young, who retired because of repeated concussions, some on hits that would be outlawed under today’s rules. Their conversations, Woodson said, meander to what it would be like to play in this era, in which receivers cannot be thumped in the head over the middle or jammed more than 5 yards downfield and in which quarterbacks, who drive television ratings and interest, can hardly be touched.
“Can you imagine Dan Marino playing in this system? Can you imagine how fast he’d get the ball to the receivers?” former NFL coach Steve Mariucci, now an analyst for NFL Network, said in a telephone interview. “He’d have a bazillion yards.”
Even so, Marino finished with 61,361 and is now fifth on the career list. In 1984, he became the first NFL player to throw for more than 5,000 yards, a number that has now been exceeded eight other times — five times by Brees alone. In his first preseason game, in 2001, at Miami, as a rookie for the Chargers, Brees said he gazed at Marino’s passing totals and hoped he would just be a starter someday.
Like that of his idols, Brees’ excellence transcends eras: Nobody else in NFL history has completed more passes; had more games of 300, 350 and 400 passing yards; or has led or tied for most passing yards in a season as many as his seven times. By any objective measure, he is one of the finest quarterbacks ever. Those best positioned to eclipse him — like Stafford, for instance — are not perceived that way, at least at this stage of their careers, despite their inflated statistics.
With few, if any, exceptions, the most hallowed marks in the NFL and in other sports belong to alltime greats: Wayne Gretzky, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Barry Bonds, Jerry Rice. Turney, the football historian, said that if a player like Ryan or Stafford, who has yet to win a playoff game in his career, overtook Brees, it could diminish the sheen of the record, noting how weird it felt when Sam Bradford finished 2016 with the highest single-season completion percentage (Brees surpassed it last year). Martz and Mariucci, for their part, disagreed.
“It’s still not common, it’s still an elite record, no matter who gets there or how they get there,” Martz said. “That’s the thing that can’t be lost.”