Scoring surge stealing CFL’s thunder
In the National Football League, 30 is the new 20.
Where once a couple of converted touchdowns and a pair of field goals would be more than enough to win an NFL game, early returns after four weeks of the NFL season suggest that if you’re not scoring 30 points per game, you’re not likely to be winning much.
The league went into play on Sunday with all sorts of alarms going off about the coronavirus pandemic and an upsurge in positive tests, of course, but also about the high level of scoring. Most people like it, while some traditionalists decry the absence of stout defensive football.
The response? Including Thursday’s Jets-Broncos game and the eight early games on Sunday, the winning teams scored 37, 35, 38, 33, 31, 31, 49, 31 and 31 points.
That, ladies and gentlemen, is not “three yards and a cloud of dust” football.
The numbers have been crazy in a record-setting start to the NFL season on offence. Just take Sunday’s Cleveland-Dallas game. The teams combined for 87 points, 1,074 yards and 68 first downs. Dallas quarterback Dak Prescott threw for 502 yards. The Browns running attack slashed through the Cowboys defence for 307 yards.
The ancient helmsman, 43year-old Tom Brady, led his new Tampa Bay team to a come-from-behind effort over San Diego by throwing for 369 yards and five touchdowns. The Bucs exploded for 484 yards of offence. Jacksonville and Cincinnati, two of the league’s doormats, rode the arms of their young quarterbacks to combine for 58 points, 934 offensive yards and 53 first downs.
By NFL standards, all of this is just nuts. Scoring is up 16 per cent compared to a decade ago, and 25 per cent compared to 2000. Teams are averaging about 25 points a game, while back in the early 1990s the average was less than 20.
So what’s going on? Theories abound.
Some say it’s the product of a new standard on offensive holding penalties, which has resulted in far fewer penalties.
Some say it’s an uptick in pass interference calls.
The absence of fans because of COVID-19 has meant visiting offences no longer have to deal with crowd noise issues.
There were no pre-season games, which some suggest means defences have yet to catch up with offences.
The XFL is still around and making noise, and there are suggestions the NFL doesn’t want to give the rival league any oxygen by being able to present itself as more wide open and exciting than the stodgy NFL.
We’ll see if the numbers continue to trend in the same direction. Let’s hope so. Right now, despite empty stadiums, the NFL is delivering a compelling entertainment product that has seen more see-saw games and spectacular offensive performances.
Up here in Canada, of course, there is no football. Canadian Football League owners decided in the summer that with fans unable to attend games because of COVID, and without a large infusion of federal government money, there was no point even trying to hold a shortened season.
The NHL and NBA went with “bubble” concepts, and baseball created a 60-game schedule. Without the massive television contracts of those leagues, however, the CFL decided against trying to play at all.
That’s led to widespread speculation about the gloomy future of a league that was already struggling to draw the same crowds it was able to draw 20 years ago. Given that the same pandemic conditions could stretch into mid-2021 or further, it’s not at all clear the CFL will be able to return next year.
That’s bad enough. But the explosion of offensive football in the NFL just makes it all a little bit worse.
Once upon a time, the CFL could make the argument that three-down football created more passing, more scoring and more excitement. That was certainly the rationale many diehard CFL fans could cite when asked why they preferred the game as it was played north of the CanadaU.S. border. The contrast was clear.
But as the CFL sits dormant, it’s clear those arguments no longer apply. Scoring in the NFL is now about the same as the CFL, which was about an average of 25 points per team last season. While the Canadian league has lost a number of marquee quarterbacks in recent years and been unable to replace them with similarly talented signal-callers, the likes of Patrick Mahomes, Josh Allen, Joe Burrow, Baker Mayfield, Lamar Jackson and Kyler Murray have delivered a new generation of dynamic players under centre.
Just across the border, Allen leads a 4-0 Buffalo Bills team that has scored at least 30 points in three of its four games.
Cleveland’s long-suffering fans have seen their team average a shade under 40 points a game the last three weeks. On and on it goes, right across the league.
Comparing the NFL and CFL has never made much sense. They operate on different scales of economy. But it always helped the CFL to be able to argue it was the home of the wild shootout, and far less stuffy than the NFL.
Those days are gone. The NFL now loves offence, passing and points as much as the CFL ever has. When (if?) the CFL does return, it better come back with something new to grab our gridiron attention.