Yesterday, I looked at Norm Van Brocklin and how he set the single-game passing record with 554 passing yards. This was done way back in 1951, in a game against the New York Yanks. In that post, I noted that big passing games in Van Brocklin’s era tended to come against bad teams in blowouts, while big passing games now come in more competitive games. Let’s investigate that a bit more today.
In the 1950s, there were 10 games where a team threw for at least 400 gross passing yards (that is, without deducting sack yards). In those games, the average team threw for 444.5 yards, while the opponent had just 159.3 passing yards. And the 400-yard passing team led by, on average, 5.4 points, 13.3 points, 24.6 points, and 26.6 points after each quarter.
In other words, those were one-sided affairs where the winning team was able to name its score (and number of passing yards). Van Brocklin’s game against the Yanks is a good example; in modern times, this is much less common, with the Patriots/Titans snow game from 2009 being an outlier (New England passed for 442 yards, while Tennessee had negative passing yards even without including sacks!).
Let’s compare that to the 2010s. There have been 126 passing games of 400+ yards, with an average of 436.6 passing yards. On average, the opponents in those games had a 300-yard game — 306.9 passing yards, to be exact. And the games were almost always close, with the margin being within 2 points at the end of each quarter (in fact, it was negative for the big passing team).
The table below shows the detailed passing data for games in each decade since 1940.
| Decade | Count | Pass Yd | Att | Opp Pyd | Opp Att | Q1 | Q2 | Q3 | Q4 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1940s | 10 | 436.0 | 38.7 | 202.3 | 31.7 | 1.0 | 9.3 | 12.5 | 18.8 |
| 1950s | 10 | 444.5 | 40.4 | 159.3 | 33.4 | 5.4 | 13.3 | 24.6 | 26.6 |
| 1960s | 38 | 433.1 | 40.9 | 235.4 | 31.4 | 1.6 | 4.7 | 5.8 | 10.2 |
| 1970s | 6 | 447.0 | 39.0 | 214.7 | 24.8 | -0.2 | 3.3 | -0.5 | 3.3 |
| 1980s | 82 | 435.8 | 47.3 | 261.1 | 33.4 | -2.2 | -2.0 | -2.4 | 1.1 |
| 1990s | 52 | 432.6 | 48.4 | 276.0 | 34.8 | -1.8 | -2.0 | -2.4 | 1.5 |
| 2000s | 77 | 434.5 | 47.4 | 255.6 | 32.1 | 0.7 | 1.2 | 0.3 | 0.8 |
| 2010s | 126 | 436.6 | 47.8 | 306.9 | 36.6 | -0.3 | -1.5 | -0.6 | -0.2 |
| Tot/Avg | 401 | 437.5 | 43.7 | 238.9 | 32.3 | 0.5 | 3.3 | 4.7 | 7.8 |
A few thoughts;
- 400-yard passing teams averaged around 40 pass attempts per game in the ’40s, ’50s, ’60s, and ’70s; since then, the teams have averaged around 48 pass attempts per game.
- Similarly, opposing passing yards really jumped in the ’80s, and was high in the ’90s and ’00s, before eclipsing 300 yards in modern times. There were also 30 games where both teams had 400+ passing yards.
- The halftime scoring margin is a good way to get a sense of how competitive the game was. In the ’40s and ’50s, the big passing games came in noncompetitive games. But by the ’80s, the big passing team already was trailing at halftime.
One other difference not shown in the chart is winning percentage. In the ’40s, it was 70%, and then 100% in the ’50s. In the ’60s and ’70s, it was still 74% and 67% for teams that threw for at least 400 passing yards. In 1980, those teams won 51% of their games, which jumped back up to 60% in the ’90s. But in the 2000s, the winning percentage of 400-yard passing teams was just 49%, and that dropped to 46% in the 2010s. In other words, 400-yard passing games now, more often than not, come in losing efforts. That may feel intuitive to fantasy football players, but it’s worth noting that it didn’t used to be this way.