State of Offense, Fantasy Football 2024: Who Turned Out the Lights?

First, a heartfelt holiday, thanks to all of you dear readers who enjoy this fantasy stuff of ours. With football season almost behind us, I'm putting away my usual speculator tools to do some research on the 2024 NFL season so far. Before we begin, I would like to thank Brandon Funston for giving me the green light for my exploration mission without knowing whether or not I would find anything. I thought we'd start with the claim that the violation is league-wide this year, whether that's true or not, and then see if we can figure out why (should the claim turn out to be true).

(All data spans 10 years, per TruMedia)

Would the number of violations have decreased by 2024?

All you had to do was open a social media app to hear the moans and groans of frustrated fantasy players at the start of the 2024 campaign. I felt it too. Or at least I think so. That's the problem with anecdotal evidence: it often lacks verification and fails to represent the larger sample. Maybe it was just the games that were more heavily televised. Maybe I just wrote terribly. Anyway, it's nice to see where we are.

The first step of my journey almost ended up on a rake, focusing on the NFL scoring an output instead of an input. The 22.8 points scored per game this season lands squarely in the middle of the pack over the past decade, but it fails to capture the critical context with a change in perspective: the devil is always in the details. View 2024 in relation to the field through a more efficiency-based lens, plotting total play with yards per play (image below). Suddenly, the 22.8 average point total I was referring to earlier seems like it's doing some really heavy lifting. It turns out that 2024 ranks last in plays with bottom three yard output. To make a long story long, if we were to run 2024 through a simulator 10,000 times with the same results, you can bet the average point total will be closer to the recent lows of 2022 and 2023.

It feels safe enough to move forward with confidence with confirmation of a significant drop in attack this season. Now that it's established, we can split the output into run versus pass to try to find a where.

Where did the decline in offense occur?

Before I could even start comparing and contrasting attacking phases at a detailed level, I was stopped dead in my tracks. Somehow, despite all the content and number crunching I do, I still hadn't noticed that the league had the ball at the highest level in a decade. Talk about missing the forest for the trees. And rushes have traveled on average almost as many meters as at any time in the last decade (image below). Many running plays automatically bleed the clock, but effective rushing plays bleed. If you do that enough, it will affect the season.

It appears that we have identified at least part of the place where the apparent decline in fantasy production occurred. That was fruitful. I guess sometimes it's better to be lucky than good, but I don't want to run away from it completely just yet, even if it's to get a basic idea of ​​what happened.

If you've been scratching your head until now because you could swear that passing is also responsible for the drop-off, you're not wrong. Dropbacks, attempts and completions per game are all at ten-year lows as well. And that's not all. It's even worse than we might have thought: the lower frequency of total passes also coincides with the lowest target depth in our example (image below). Given the undeniable trend, I fear the era of the wet blanket is here to stay. Consider our where identified. All that remains now is the why

Why did the decrease in violation rate occur?

I doubt I can solve much of this problem in this short exercise. If I could, I'd probably carry a team-themed clipboard with keys to an operational facility. Our ability to track data hasn't really caught up to the defensive complexity of the league. With the fluidity of so many moving parts, it's nearly impossible to compress that enormous amount of information into single, quantifiable data points. What do we end up with as analysts or gamers? A beautiful but flawed combination of art and science, where claims are born from watching tapes and spreadsheets, only to be sent out for testing, knowing the chances of failure are high.

Anyway, I thought, why not throw my hat in the ring? After reviewing dozens of statistics and throwing my hands up in the air, all I ended up with was a dumber look on my face than when I started. (Ha!) Joking aside, I started messing around with some of the more detailed TruMedia filters when the (weak) light went out

(For reference: TruMedia coverage data started in 2019)

Could everyone's favorite villain, zone coverage and, more specifically, the vaunted two-high grenade, be responsible for taking out the lights? I had gotten so tired of hearing about it on every pregame broadcast and podcast for so long that the mental block became a reality. Well, if you've heard of Occam's Razor before, you may not be surprised to learn that the simplest answer is the most correct in every respect.

Conclusion

In terms of shaping future fantasy-related decisions, I think we'll continue to see the return of running backs to their former fantasy glory. At the same time, expect major consolidation at the WR position outside of players with the versatility to work from multiple spots on the field.

What separates wideouts like CeeDee Lamb and Justin Jefferson from the pack by providing a lethal combination of ceiling and floor is their effort and subsequent production from the slot. Some teams will rely so heavily on shell-based preventative styles that sometimes deep shots can and will be eliminated completely. If I've learned anything this year, it's that I will do my best to avoid spending premium draft capital on fantasy assets with those specific restrictions in the future.

(Photo by Tyreek Hill: Megan Briggs/Getty Images)