Ten years ago, I looked at the passing distribution of NFL teams since 1970. Let’s revisit that post today, with an expanded look at what’s happened over the last decade.

I examined every season in the NFL since 1970, when the AFL and NFL merged. ^[1]It is not lost on me that NFL history is not linear, and in many ways, the 1960s is more similar to the 1980s than the 1970s. That said, out of laziness, I only went back to 1970. I then calculated the percentage of receiving yards for each team that went to its running backs, tight ends and wide receivers. The graph below shows the breakdown from each season from 1970 through 2021. ^[2]Some caveats: Obviously many players straddle the line across multiple positions. There are some judgment calls involved with H-Backs, tight ends turned wide receivers, running backs turned tight … Continue reading. There are two large trends: wide receivers have become slightly more important over time, jumping from 53% of the receiving pie during the ’70s to 63% over the last ten years. The entire jump, though, came in the aftermath of the 1978 rules changes, as the percentage of receiving yards that went to wide receivers steadily rose form 53% in 1977 to 62% in 1987 and 1988.

The other notable change is the switch in primacy of the tight end relative to the running back. From 1970 to 1983, running backs gained 27% of all receiving yards while tight ends picked up just 19% of the pie. That breakdown was pretty consistent each season: tight ends were at 18%, 19%, or 20% almost every season, and running backs consistently gained between 25% and 29& of the receiving game. The 1984 season was a weird outlier: running back production was way down while tight end production was up, but that was mostly a one year blip. From 1985 to 1994, running backs averaged 22% of the pie, a noticeable decrease from the pre-1984 era, but tight ends dropped, too, down to 15% during that decade. And from 1986 through 2007, tight ends were under 20% of the receiving pie each year. But tight ends have held steady at 20 or 21 percent, while running back production in the receiving game has dropped to about 16%. In 2004, tight ends gained more receiving yards as a group than running backs, and it has remained that way in every season since. This is strongly tied, of course, to the near-elimination of the fullback position from the modern game. [continue reading…]