These 5 Numbers Will Speak Volumes About The 2023 NFL Season
These 5 Numbers Will Speak Volumes About The 2023 NFL Season
From a bit of a run-game renaissance to a lovable loser that rarely meets the hype, quarterbacks on the move and those who age gracefully, some of the metrics that best explain the NFL right now.
The NFL is all about toughness and physicality, blazing speed and supreme skill. But in the end, it’s also a numbers game: After 22 weeks and 285 total games, 32 teams will be whittled down to one champion. So let’s dive into five big numbers that, depending on whether they are met or not, will go a long way toward explaining and determining what happens in the 2023 season.
4.5: Last season’s record-setting leaguewide yards per carry.
For a long time, increased leaguewide passing was the best bet in the NFL. In the 18 seasons from 1998 to 2015, the league’s passers saw either their yards per game or yards per attempt — or both — go up year-over-year 16 times. It was a great time to be a QB! (Less so a running back.) But everything hits the point of diminishing returns eventually, and that’s where the dynamic of passing-versus-rushing might be heading in 2023.
While yards per pass (6.1) was at its lowest point since 2007 last season, yards per carry (4.5) set a new all-time NFL high-water mark. Now, before the league’s rushers get too excited, it was probably just a testament to how selectively the run was used as a weapon. Facing 8-plus defenders in the box just 19.4% of the time, per SportRadar (that figure was 28.3% as recently as 2017), a whopping 62.8% of rushing yards were accrued before first contact — the highest share in a season since at least 2007, and the first time in the sample that rate was above 60%.
If defenses begin to honor the run more this season, look for yards per carry to go down. But if not, rushing might continue its comeback as a historically effective tactic in more situations.
9.5: Preseason over/under for the Detroit Lions, the team’s highest since (at least) 1989.
Every offseason, it seems there’s a buzzy team that captures the imaginations of fans before the games actually start to count. Carrying the banner for that phenomenon this year are the Lions, whose over/under for wins in Vegas — 9.5, according to Pro-Football-Reference — is the highest for the franchise since at least 1989.
The last time the team was projected for even 9 wins? That would be 2012, when Detroit went 4–12 despite Calvin Johnson producing 1,964 yards on 122 catches. And before that was 1992, when the Wayne Fontes-led Lions went 5–11 despite Barry Sanders running for 1,352 yards and nine TDs.
Detroit’s championship odds (+2200, which works out to an implied probability of 3.6% after removing the take) are also unusually high by the franchise’s standards. The last time the Lions went into a season this likely to win their first Super Bowl, Independence Day was zeroing in on $300 million at the box office and “Macarena” was dominating the airwaves. (Yes, it was 1996 — and those Lions also flopped to 5–11. Are we sensing a theme here?)
These Lions could buck all of that history and finally deliver a title to their loyal supporters. But if they flop again, at least Detroit fans won’t have to find a way to reconcile winning with their long-standing identity as losers.
15.4%: Share of all rushing yards by QBs in 2022.
A bit related to the rise of leaguewide yards per carry is the fact that quarterbacks have never been relied upon to do more rushing than right now. Last season set a new NFL record — going back to at least 1948, the earliest season in SportRadar’s data — for rushing attempts (2,293), rushing yards (10,156) and the share of total league rushing yards (15.4%) by QBs. A record five different signal-callers (Justin Fields, Lamar Jackson, Josh Allen, Jalen Hurts and Daniel Jones) topped 700 yards, with Fields’ 1,143-yard total coming just 63 yards shy of Jackson’s all-time QB record for a season.
With Fields gaining more experience, Jackson hoping to return to full health, debut seasons for a new crop of highly drafted rookie QBs who each gained at least 200 rushing yards last year (after removing sacks), and the league doing nothing to modify rules around QB rushing plays (such as the Eagles’ “tush push”), there’s little reason to think 2023 won’t continue the upward trajectory of quarterbacks running the football. It’s a trend that has dramatically reshaped how NFL offenses (and defenses) operate in recent seasons.
18: Years since a back-to-back Super Bowl champion.
It’s no surprise that the Kansas City Chiefs are favorites to run it back as Super Bowl champs once again in 2023. K.C. has the NFL’s best quarterback (Patrick Mahomes) and best tight end (Travis Kelce, who won’t be gone for long), to go with a solid roster overall. Perhaps the only thing working against the Chiefs is that defending champions are in a nearly two-decades-long slump right now. Since the New England Patriots won back-to-back Super Bowls after the 2003 and 2004 seasons, NFL champs are 0-for-18 in their title defenses, with just four of them making it back to the conference championship game and three returning to the Super Bowl.
The Mahomes-era Chiefs are in that latter sample: They won it all after the 2019 season and then returned to the Super Bowl but lost to Tom Brady and the Tampa Bay Buccaneers. But they’re part of the exception to the overall rule in recent seasons. Things weren’t always quite this bad for defending champs — four of the first 13 Super Bowl winners defended their titles — but it remains very hard to stay at the top of the NFL’s mountain for a sustained period of time. While K.C. might be the single best bet to win of any team, there’s a reason the field has an implied 88% chance of knocking them off before all is said and done this season.
40: Aaron Rodgers’ age on Dec. 2.
Yes, Aaron Rodgers is already the toast of the town in New York for the Super Bowl potential he brings to his New York Jets. But whether or not the soon-to-be-40-year-old QB ignores Father Time is possibly the defining question of the 2023 season.
Despite a few recent examples of older quarterbacks — such as Brady and Drew Brees — blowing up the aging curve, the history of Hall of Fame passers at Rodgers’ age, or anything close to it, isn’t pretty. Using Pro-Football-Reference’s Approximate Value (AV) as a guideline, I looked at 30 Canton-bound (or Canton-adjacent) modern QBs to find their season-age when they last had great (15 AV), average (10 AV) or even highly mediocre (5 AV) campaigns. Of the 30 QBs, 28 were finished with greatness by the age Rodgers will be this season; 26 were done being average, and 24 were finished even being as good as mediocre by the same age.
There’s some irony to which of the QBs wasn’t done being great by his age-40 season. Sure, Brady is in there, but he was an ageless freak of nature whose career was improbable on every possible level. The other name on the list, though? Brett Favre, who blazed the same trail from the Green Bay Packers to the Jets that Rodgers is trying now, and was actually very good — like, MVP-level good — at age 40, albeit after leaving New York for the Minnesota Vikings.
Favre, behind whom Rodgers sat for the first three seasons of his career before becoming the Packers’ starter, provides one of the only real templates we have for Rodgers being truly effective in 2023. Will that be necessary? The Jets’ defense was fourth in expected points added last season, so maybe New York can get by with a season like Rodgers had in 2022, when he was essentially an average QB efficiency-wise. But given what we know about how fickle NFL defenses are, the Jets will probably need vintage Rodgers at some point — and that means needing him to defy most of what we know about quarterback aging patterns.
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