This is Part 2 to yesterday’s post about how value is determined. Please read that before proceeding.

Here’s a hypothetical situation to consider. In a few months, the NFL owners get together and decide that passing is too easy, scoring is too high, and offenses are too good. As a result, they have agreed upon a drastic rules change: starting in the 2020 season, NFL defenses will be allowed to put 12 players on the field, while NFL offenses will still be constrained to 11 players.

This will significantly change the NFL landscape, of course. Scoring is going to plummet. Passing efficiency is going to tank, and rushing with any sort of consistency is going to be impossible.

Now, here’s a question. You are the Kansas City Chiefs with Patrick Mahomes, who — for the sake of this argument — has just completed his second consecutive MVP season. He’s the clear best quarterback in the NFL, but he will now be playing in an NFL where passing is going to be much, much harder.

Does this rule change help or hurt your team’s chances of winning?

Think about it for a minute.

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I can wait.

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There is no right answer, but you should at least have a theory to support your answer.

Okay, ready?

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In my opinion, this would help the Chiefs. I suspect that putting 12 defensive players on the field will make the best quarterbacks more valuable. That’s because passing would be more difficult, and by making it more difficult, the best quarterbacks would be more valuable.

Why? Let’s think about this from another angle.

Let’s say the NFL wanted to stage a game that included an NFL offense facing off against an average college football defense. The passing numbers would be absurd, but they would be absurd no matter who was the NFL quarterback. It wouldn’t matter much if the NFL had Mahomes, an average NFL starting quarterback, or even an average backup. Heck, the 64th-best QB in the NFL would still lead an offense that would operate like a hot knife through butter against a college defense. In that context, the value of a top quarterback becomes diminished.

In most areas of life, as something becomes easier, it becomes less valuable.  This is easier to see in other contexts, like how technology impacts the marketplace. As widgets become easier to produce, they become cheaper. When Henry Ford built the first assembly line for mass production of automobiles, that reduced the time it took to build a car from over 12 hours to two hours and 30 minutes. And that made car prices cheaper, because they were easier to make.

Typically, as something becomes easier, it becomes less valuable, or less scarce. That is true in the NFL, too. If passing became a lot easier, it would become less valuable, and less scarce — or easier to reproduce. That’s why the 64th-best or 96th-best QB could come very, very close to reproducing what Mahomes could do against a college defense.

Now, back to our original example. If the NFL allowed 12 defensive players on the field, that would have the opposite effect. Passing would become much harder, making good passing much more valuable. It would be scarce. There might only be a couple of quarterbacks in the NFL that could field an offense capable of scoring double digit points. Now, having Mahomes would be really, really valuable.  There are limits on this, of course, and it’s worth keeping these in mind. That’s because there is not necessarily a linear relationship between difficulty and value. If there were 30 defensive players on the field, the difference between Mahomes and a bad quarterback would now be smaller: nobody would score no matter the quarterback.  But the value of any player is in relation to his peers (or replacements), so if passing becomes pretty easy, Mahomes needs to be that much better than everyone else to be really valuable.

We understand this so easily outside of football: you know that in 10 years, phones are going to be better than they currently are and also cheaper. But in the NFL, we have statistics and the history books playing with our memories. When rules changes make passing much easier, and when most quarterbacks are producing big numbers, the conclusion isn’t that quarterbacks are less valuable than they used to be. It’s that they’re more valuable! We are comparing the stats of Patrick Mahomes to those of Steve DeBerg, which makes us think quarterbacks are more valuable than ever.

In addition to quarterback play being easier — also evidenced by the immediate success of college quarterbacks — I noted yesterday that the value of a passing offense is driven by the variance in the league. And yes, that has been declining, too. The graph below shows the standard deviation in passing efficiency — as measured by Adjusted Net Yards per Attempt — for each season since 1970.

So passing has become easier than ever and more compressed than ever. If you want to argue that the value of a top passing offense is lower than ever, this data would strongly support your thesis.