newjerseynewsroom.com

BY SAM HITCHCOCK

NEWJERSEYNEWSROOM.COM

COMMENTARY

The NFL’s referee debacle is finally resolved, so now people can begin to focus on the league and where it is heading. There is no question that offense is king in today’s game. It has been well documented by the Elias Stats Bureau that, this year, NFL offenses are putting up astronomical numbers of points each week. Yet there may be a new paradigm emerging that demonstrates the significance of a dominant defense.

In Week 2, over half of the teams in the NFL scored more than 27 points. Any team that scored less than 20 points (nine teams did) lost. In four different games in Week 3, both teams scored 30 or more points. Two unexpected quarterbacks, Buffalo Bills’ Ryan Fitzpatrick and Cincinnati Bengals’ Andy Dalton, combined for six touchdowns and one interception.

After Week 3, Bengals’ coach Marvin Lewis was quoted as saying, “If you have a defense that’s fairly consistent, and a quarterback who can move the ball, you’re going to be in a lot of games. And right now, there’s a lot of good quarterbacks in this league.”

The increased importance of quarterbacks over the last five years has been discussed ad nauseam, and a crop of young quarterbacks seems well-positioned to replace the old guard. When reviewing the NFL standings, there are potentially 25 to 26 teams that genuinely believe they have their franchise quarterback of the present or very near future in place. That’s out of 32 clubs, meaning 80 percent of NFL teams believe they are secure at the sport’s most challenging position.

Because the NFL is so pass-happy, everyone assumes that a great quarterback means a Super Bowl championship. But maybe we have it wrong and actually it is the inverse: develop a dominant defense in the face of the new NFL rules, and with a serviceable quarterback a team should generate enough points to win consistently.

Of course, it should first be acknowledged that, though defenses are faster, more complex and scheme-oriented than ever before, they still are heavily handicapped in today’s NFL. Think about everything they have going against them.

Any contact a defensive back has with a receiver (especially during the era of replacement officials), he does at his own peril because defensive pass interference allows offenses to move up and down the field. Safeties and linebackers have to be extremely cautious with how they tackle and in what way they make contact with ball carriers (avoiding helmet-to-helmet contact and the horse-collar tackle). Front sevens are finally adjusting to the new quarterback rules so that if the quarterback releases the ball a split-second early, they will pull up to avoid roughing the passer.

The upshot for offensive coordinators is that they utilize their fast, athletic, rangy receivers in ways that make them nearly impossible to stop. They use bubble screens, slant routes through the middle, and isolated one-on-one coverages to generate consistent first downs or second downs and short. Coupling that with the increase in penalties for any defensive physicality or slip-up, one sees why teams are generating so many points even with merely adequate quarterbacks.

Take Matthew Stafford of the Detroit Lions. It’s still very much in question whether he will go on to be a fine quarterback, but he passed for a staggering 5,000 yards last year. Injuries limited his effectiveness and playing time before 2011, but his statistical sample was a far cry from producing a quarterbacking season comparable to some of the greatest the NFL has ever seen.

Through three games this year, Stafford has been mediocre, going 84-122 with 3 TDs and 4 INTS. And while he had his best game of the season on Sunday, an injury forced him to be replaced by Detroit’s backup, Shaun Hill. Hill filled in for Stafford by almost leading them to a miraculous comeback victory!

Looking at the NFL through three weeks, there are some interesting names that pop up in quarterback statistics like QBR (ESPN’s QB metric for Total Quarterback Rating) or the traditional passer rating. According to QBR, Andrew Luck, Alex Smith, Jake Locker, and Dalton are in the top six for best season rating in the NFL. In the more traditional NFL passer rating, Kevin Kolb, Dalton, Christian Ponder, and Robert Griffin III are in the top six (with Smith at No. 7).

It is three games into the season, so it is unwise to draw quick conclusions, yet most of these quarterbacks are very young and Smith is having a late-blooming renaissance. Maybe it is not a changing of the guard, but a function of a decreased degree of difficulty because offensive coordinators can use their quarterbacks to exploit defenses within the current NFL rules. (It does make you wonder: what if quarterback “busts” like Joey Harrington, Kyle Boller, and JaMarcus Russell just came into the league a few years too early? A few years ago, wasn’t Alex Smith listed just a notch above their category?)

This also stands as an explanation for why more quarterbacks are younger when they come into the league and have much more success. Grantland’s football guru Chris Brown has described how more teams are packaging plays, meaning they are giving their quarterbacks options at the snap of the ball to read the defense and choose a run or pass. With the increased handicapping of defenses, how are they supposed to stop these quarterback-driven offenses?