1993 DVOA Ratings and Commentary

Gotta love that the Raiders are abbreviated LARD. Now I'll go back and read the rest.

Ah, the '90s and the Wild, Wild AFC West. I miss those days.

Junior Seau also played every season from 1994 to 2009, if only parts of the last two.

Buddy Ryan punched Kevin Gilbride at the end of the first half, not at the end of the game, mostly because the Oilers tried for extra scores when Ryan thought they should have sat on their 14-0 lead. Right before the punch, Cody Carlson was sacked and fumbled with 0:24 to go, giving the Jets the ball at the Oiler 18, setting the Jets up for a score after they couldn't do anything all half. (In true Jet fashion, they lost a yard in 3 plays and missed a field goal to preserve the shutout.)

This is also the year Super Tecmo Bowl is based on!

How in the world do your charters tally games dating back that far? The amount of video you have access to can't be more than a tape of the original TV broadcast.

That was an amazing season for Elway and Sharpe. Ineffective running game with Rod Bernstine's 800 yards at 3.7 per carry. WRs led by Derek Russell (who?) for 13 games in his one half decent season. Everyone knew it was going to be Elway to Sharpe and somehow Denver still had a top 5 offence.

I miss the old AFC West.

The most dissapointing part of that Ryan-Gilbride video is that it cuts off before they go to Pam Oliver. I had no idea she had been around that long, this raised so many questions for me. Was she any worse then than she is now? can sideline reporters improve with time? most importantly, how did she look back then? my guess: smokin hot.

Michael Irvin=most talented skill position player on those Cowboys teams. Yes, that includes Emmitt.

Ahh, the year that marks the sudden decline of Jim Mora's Saints. They started this year 5-0 before finishing 8-8. DVOA shows the collapse wasn't just a trick of schedule: defensive DVOA of -10%, but weighted was -5.4%; offensive DVOA of -19.6% but weighted was -34.5%!!!

(note: back then Jim Mora was a defensive genius and knew nothing about offense)

I'm really interested in what the DVOA numbers will come up with as you go to the years before this. The Saints were a really good team in that era with no playoff success. Jim Finks had assembled the team in the late 80s through the draft and with ex-USFL players, but retired in 1992. However, even under Finks the organization had shown an inability to adapt to changing ways of the league: in 1990 he let QB Bobby Hebert sit out a year rather than pay him a whole $1 million, yet could not find anyone else competent to play QB for a team with an elite defense.

The yardage comparison table between Rice and Irvin is not written in the most useful form. By itself, it means nothing to me that 26% of Rice's receptions were between 11-15 yards, while 38% of Irvin's receptions were in the same category.

It would be useful to instead list cumulative statistics for each yardage category. By which I mean, tell us that 66% of Rice's receptions were less than 15 yards, while 63% of Irvin's receptions were in that range.

Of course, percentages alone aren't terribly interesting either.

Oh - great job, BTW.

John Carney probably played every season from '88-2009. You won't be rid of players in every year before 2010 for a while. I hope he plays next season, too.
Though apparently he didn't actually do anything in '89, just suited up for one game (if that's how I should interpret NFL.com's 1 Game 0 Games Started).

It is tempting to view the current, late-2000s NFL as exceptional, with pass offense on a seemingly endless upward spiral, and parity wilting in the face of persistent Pats-Colts-Steelers dominance and Lions-Raiders-Browns futility. But in many statistical categories — scoring, offensive yardage, cumulative wins by playoff teams — the modern era is quite unremarkable. (2009 may be an exception.)

The period 1991-93, however, was genuinely remarkable: it was the last time the NFL worried it had a boring product. DVOA is now wading into the strangest period in recent NFL history. Here are some stats to prove the point:

• Over the three years 1991-93, teams averaged 18.9 points per game. That’s the third-lowest average since 1942-44. Only 1976-78 and 1977-79 were lower — and those years prompted wholesale changes to the rules. Six teams scored fewer than 200 points in a year during 1991-93, something that had never happened in a 16-game season until 1990, and has only happened four times since.

• The decline in scoring happened despite increases in field goals and defensive and special teams scores. Rushing and passing touchdowns plummeted to unfathomable depths. Teams averaged fewer than 0.8 rushing TDs/game in two straight years, 1992-93, for the first and only time since 1936-37. Passing TDs/game dipped to levels last seen before the rule changes in 1977-78: the 1544 TDs thrown in 1991-93 were 19% fewer than in the peak three-year period of 1983-85, and more than one-third below 2007-09. Combined rushing and receiving TDs averaged 1.9 per game, the lowest three-year total since 1940-42. The nadir was 1993: with only 825 rushing and receiving TDs in 448 games, it became the lowest-scoring season for offense since 1938.

• Yardage was down, too. Here, 1993 was the best of the three years — and marginally better than 1990, too — but its yards/game average of 317.9 was still lower than any year of the 1980s. (It was higher than 2005 or 2001, though, and equal to the 1996-2000 average). Taking a four-year period from 1990-93, the average yards/game of 306.1 was the lowest since 1973-76, some 7.6% down from a peak of 329.5 in 1983-86 — though only 1.2 % below the 2006-09 average of 309.6.

• When you think of early 1990s offense, you think West Coast and you think Run’n’Shoot. Sure enough, rushing attempts and yardage shrank significantly. Team rush attempts/game fell below 30 for the first time ever in 1989 (29.2) and have not exceeded 28.4 since. Indeed, 1990-93 can be seen as the beginning of the modern rush-o-phobic era: the average of 27.8 attempts/game is very similar to 2006-09 (27.6). However, the average gain remained at 1980s levels (3.9 yards/carry) rather than today’s 4.2.

• But wait! What’s this about passing attempts? They were down too? After averaging between 31.4 and 32.3 passes/game every season from 1981 to 1989, suddenly the numbers dropped: 30.2 att/g in 1990, 31.1 in 1991, 29.9 in 1992. (Attempts in 1993 bounced back close to 1980s levels at 32.2.) Only one season since then has been below 32 att/g (2004).

• Passing yardage stumbled as a result, dipping below 200 yards/game in three straight years, 1990-92, before ‘recovering’ to 200.6 in 1993. The last full season below 200 pass y/g had been 1980. None has been below 200 y/g since; the average of the last decade has been 208.8, with a low of 200.4 in 2003.

• This despite record completion percentages. 1991 saw the league average top 57% for the first time ever, and 1992 and 1993 were better still: the three-year average of 57.6% was up almost three percentage points on 1985-87, and one whole percentage point better than the previous three-year high (1982-84).

• Consequently yards/attempt were down only marginally on the 1980s. Here, 1993 was the worst year — only five seasons in the last 64 years have had worse than its 6.7 y/a average: four of them in the mid-1970s, the other being 2003. Nevertheless, the three-year average for y/a from 1991-93 (6.8%) is only fractionally lower than 2007-09 (6.9%) and better than any three-year stretch between 1994 and 2004.

• The other improvement was the interception rate. This dipped to 3.3% in 1993, the best rate ever at the time, and more than 20% lower than it had been only a decade earlier. The rate had hit record lows about every other year from 1978 to 1992, but even the 1991 rate of 3.5% has not been reached since. The rest of the 1990s averaged 3.2 ints/att, as did 2000-2006. The three-year period 2007-09 has set a new low at less than 3.0%.

• The sack rate for 1991-93 is pretty hard to read: there was one very bad year (1992: sack rate of 7.8%, worst since 1985) following a record best (1991, 6.6%). 1993 was between the two (6.8%) although it set a record for fewest yards lost to sacks, bettered only once between 1994 and 2001. It has been equalled or bettered every year since.

So what happened? Why did scoring and offense hit a nadir in 1991-93? And how were they resuscitated?

• The freefall in yards per completion and interception rate points to the spread of the high-percentage west-coast offense across the league. Mike Holmgren and Denny Green took their first head coaching jobs in 1992.

• Even so, this was an era dominated by defensive coaches. Almost all the best teams were either coached or built by defensive minds: Jimmy Johnson, Marty Schottenheimer, George Seifert, Buddy Ryan, Chuck Noll-Bill Cowher, Jim Mora, Jerry Glanville-Jack Pardee, Bill Parcells, Bill Belichick. It saw the debut of ‘Blitzburgh’ and the Dungy Two.

• The QBs might have been prudent, but they weren’t very good. As Aaron notes, this was a terrible era for young quarterbacking talent. There were 28 QBs drafted in rounds 1-3 between 1987 and 1993. From whatever statistical angle you choose, the careers of David Klingler, Cody Carlson, Rick Mirer and Billy Joe Tolliver were all in the better half. The rest is a mess of Stouffers, Marinovichs, McGwires and Dilwegs. Even the summit is underwhelming: after Favre and Aikman, the best QBs on the list are Bledsoe, Testaverde and Chris Chandler. Was there a massive disconnect between the college game and the NFL? Or was it just a freakily hopeless crop? (The later rounds were deeper, but the best of these were not starting in 1993 — Gannon, Brad Johnson, Brunell, Trent Green. Among those who were, Beuerlein, Peete, Richardson, Mitchell, Majkowski and Humphries were hardly setting the world on fire.)

• Even though rushing attempts were down, there was an unusually low number of plays per game in 1990-92. The average had been around 65 in the mid-80s; in 1990, it fell below 61 for the first time since 1972, and bottomed out two years later at 59.9, the lowest since 1946. There was a significant rebound in 1993, to 62.8, which has been about the average ever since. Does anyone know what happened? Was there a change in the rules governing the play-clock?

• What was the consequence of great defensive coaching, conservative offense, fewer plays, and low scoring? Why, it was parity, of course. 1993 was a prime example: of the 28 teams, some 12 finished within one game of .500. The following years would be even more balanced: 13 in 1994, 15 (of 30) in 1995, 13 again in 1996. This remains the most middle-heavy four-year streak in history.

• How much of that mediocrity can we attribute to free agency? My guess is: not much. 1993 was the first year of free agency as we know it, and only 121 players changed teams (that’s 4.3 per team). More significant was the lack of really dominant or really bad teams: no team won more than 12 games, and only one team (3-13 Cincinnati) lost more than 12. That’s only happened one other time in a 16-game season, in 1988. Again the continuity here is with the late 1980s rather than the ‘free agency period’.

• Nowhere was that continuity more evident than in the Superbowl, where the AFC representative crashed for a 10th straight year. Although the conferences were evenly balanced in total points differential, the AFC was huddled around average while the NFC had greater variance. The median distance from zero, plus or minus, in points differential for 1993 was 35.5 for the AFC, 71.0 for the NFC. That was the ninth year in a decade that the NFC had a greater disparity.

• Splitting the numbers by conference indicates that the early 1990s’ trends were very much in line with those emanating from the mid-1980s; all that had happened is the NFC had started to look a little more like the AFC. From 1986 to 1996, AFC teams produced just 13 seasons of 12 or more wins; the NFC had 21. From 1988 to 1993, AFC teams totalled 26 seasons of 10 or more wins; the NFC had 36. So the ‘mediocrity’ of the free-agency period was not new in the AFC. But the NFC had only recently begun trending down. By 1993-96 its top teams were not winning many more games than the AFC’s.

The offensive revival began in 1994 with rule changes designed to improve starting field position (and destined to provoke much wrath in overtime games). In 1995, the radio transmitter appeared in QBs’ helmets, and in 1996, officials began enforcing “more stringently” the five-yard contact rule. Offense and scoring perked up: passing yardage peaked in 1995, and offensive TDs have recovered to 1980s levels for most of the last decade-and-a-half.

Tempting as it is to read the beginning of free agency as the dawn of a new era, the numbers don’t back it up. 1993 looked and felt like the previous few years, with bad quarterbacking, low scoring, and a dreadful Superbowl.

1993 was my first year playing fantasy football, and I was lucky enough to pick up both Gary Brown and Natrone Means (#3 and #5 in DYAR) as free agent running backs. Good times!

Excellent post, Amnek. I wonder if QB scouting just went horribly wrong for a few years there. One high draft choice you didn't mention was Jeff George, who went No. 1 overall in 1990 after famously wowing them at the combine. The six-foot-eight Dan McGwire went in the first round in 1991, while 5-10 Doug Flutie had gone in the 11th a few years before the scope of your study, after a brilliant college career. And of course, the draft whiffed entirely on Kurt Warner in 1994.

I'm very surprised by how low Sterling Sharpe ranks in the 1993 and 1994 ratings. My perception, at the time, was that he was a truly elite WR, sure handed and a strong runner after the catch, and a guy clearly outpacing Michael Irvin and Tim Brown for the title of "Best WR from the 1988 Draft." After he broke the reception record in consecutive seasons, I even remember some "best WR in the game" talk taking place.

We'll see what earlier years bring, but he's starting to look like a solid but unspectacular WR, who's numbers skyrocketed when a young Brett Favre entered the lineup and started firing him the ball 12 times per game.

So the Bears were 26-9-8 in offense/defense/ST. That's really sort of funny.

I thought Shula ran pretty much the same system his whole time in the league. The Dolphins used Byars and Kirby the same way the used Bennett and Nathans in the 1980s. Marino threw a lot of passes to the backs throughout his career.

Not sure if it's a terms of use violation of some sort - not sure how the PBP's were sourced - but is there any reason why (even if for a nominal fee) FO couldn't share the underlying PBP's themselves. Could be delimited, Word, whatever. I'd love to get that to add to my collection - which stops at 1996 right now.

In case this isn't mentioned elsewhere, it's worth noting that 1993 was the first of two years when Joe Montana was the QB for the Chiefs, and his performance probably had a lot to do with their #3 ranking in DVOA, as well their appearance in the AFC title game (the Chiefs hadn't even won their division in over 20 years at that point, I believe). On Championship Sunday, when the Cowboys ultimately beat the 49ers and the Bills beat KC, we were oh-so-close to a Montana vs. the 49ers Super Bowl...can you imagine?

One of the interesting notes branching off Annex's post (which is the most in depth and informative I've ever seen on this site by a non-contributing writer) is that if you look at the Hall of Fame qbs of this era, whom people at the time set as the gold standard of qbs (Aikman, Elway, Kelly, all Hall of Famers), their numbers aren't thrilling. The one that stands out is completion percentage, which is a tell tale sign of how offense has evolved. League wide completion percentage in '93 was 57.7%, while in '09 it was 60.9%. I think this is a testament to how numbers from era to era can't be compared (in HOF disucssions, etc.), because to say that Matt Schaub is a better QB than any of the guys parenthetcally mentioned earlier would be obsene.

Ammek* sorry...that was an accident, not me being a dick

It's amazing how everyone forgets the struggling Drew Brees. Even in his "better" year of 2004, I remember how I felt all hope was lost in the SD home opener, Game 2 against the NY Jets. He was 8 of 19 for 146 yards and that doesn't even begin to tell the story of how awful he was. He had *no* touch on the ball, just rifling it when he could have lofted it with ease. It was literally a Jamarcusian performance. With all seriousness, if you has asked me the odds that he could develop into a great QB after that outing in September '04, I would have said 100-1 against. It seemed absolutely impossible that this person had any idea how to be a decent quarterback. Obviously, the Chargers agreed; that's why they drafted Rivers. Then, slowly but surely, and steadily, Brees just got better and better; now, even though he's been playing for a different team than mine for four years, he's still my favorite player.

Seriously, the lesson is some quarterbacks need time. Of course, the problem is some quarterbacks are indeed terrible and must be jettisoned. Tough thing this job of talent evaluator is.

Dallas was easily the best team in 1993 once Emmitt Smith ended his holdout. They started 0-2 without him, and still ended with the best record in the league.

The Oilers-Bills playoff game was 41-38 not 38-35

On the Taylor/Rice/Irving comparison, I wonder whether receivers aren't getting credit for being targeted more, and if not, why not. If a basketball player gets the ball only on plays in which they're favorably positioned or set up, but otherwise stays on the periphery of plays, that's obviously going to flatter their efficiency ratios (like FG%, assists/turnovers, etc.). But these clearly carry a lesser burden then the guy whose hands every play has to pass through, and are concomitantly less important to their team and crucial to its success. Likewise with any focal point of an NFL offence.

As to the Rice/Irving comparison, I question any weighting schema that has the distribution of yardage as more important than performance on 3rd down and in the red zone, not least due to the fact that the latter are (far) more important to winning actual football games, but also due to the fact that big plays are frequently determinative of game outcomes, (in any case far more so than the 20 and 30 yard variety). One wonders if a barbell is not a good thing.

This points up a second critical dimension to football performances that I don't believe is captured here, which is whether 'successful plays' and big plays come amidst blowouts or in close games where the outcome is in doubt. The difference is one of the things that separates the Michael Jordans of the world from the Allen Iversons. So that would be a glaring omission, potentially as significant as a 'strength of the opposition' omission, if indeed it is an omission.

In any case, the numbers certainly are an upgrade over raw fantasy type stats, but I'm under the impression there's non-trivial room for improvement.