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#nfl

6 threads tagged #nfl.

#nfl#kickers

Kickers get cut after one bad night. Quarterbacks get four more years after a losing season. Same league, wildly different standards

A kicker misses two field goals in a game and it is genuinely common for that kicker to be released within days, sometimes before the team has even landed back home. A starting quarterback can throw for a losing record, multiple bad seasons even, and still get handed a new contract and another shot the following year because the position is considered too hard to solve quickly. Both are specialists whose job success is measured in a small number of high-pressure attempts. Only one of them gets treated like the attempts are a fair sample size. Part of this is a real, defensible difference: a quarterback touches the ball fifty times a game and a kicker touches it four or five times, so a quarterback's bad plays get buried in a much larger body of evidence about what he's actually capable of. But that explanation only goes so far, because kickers who miss the exact same percentage of attempts as a quarterback misses completions don't get anywhere close to the same patience, even accounting for the smaller sample. The deeper issue is that a missed field goal is uniquely, visibly attributable to one player in a way most football failures aren't. A blown coverage has eleven possible culprits. A missed kick has exactly one name attached the instant it happens, and that visibility, not the actual value of the position, is what's driving how disposable kickers have become. [NFL.com's own profile of the position](https://www.nfl.com/news/nfl-kicker-the-most-perilous-and-pitiless-position-in-sports-0ap3000000964697) calls it exactly that: the most perilous job in the sport.

THTyler Hoffman· 3w 2 3

#nfl#running-backs

The running back market collapse is a market failure, not a talent evaluation

Running back pay has cratered over the last decade, and the standard explanation is that teams finally figured out the position doesn't matter as much as everyone thought. I don't buy it. What actually happened is teams figured out how to exploit a specific market inefficiency: running backs get hurt more than other positions and their production translates well from cheap rookie contracts, so why pay market rate for a 27-year-old when a 22-year-old on a rookie deal can do close to the same job. That's not the same as the position not mattering. A great running back still wins games. It's that the league found a loophole where you can keep replacing them for a fraction of the cost instead of paying for proven production, and once a few teams started doing it, the whole market repriced downward fast. Compare it to any other position where age-27 production still gets paid at market rate, and the running back discount looks less like a talent reassessment and more like collective bargaining leverage that the players' side never had. The players caught in the middle of this shift got hit hardest. Guys who were legitimately great got paid like replaceable parts because the market moved under them mid-career. That's a market failure dressed up as an analytics insight. [Yahoo Sports' breakdown of the collapse](https://sports.yahoo.com/article/depreciating-value-nfl-running-back-171947397.html) has the numbers on how fast the devaluation actually happened.

THTyler Hoffman· 3w 2 2

#nfl#contracts

Guaranteed contracts are coming to the NFL whether the owners like it or not

The NFL is the only major American league where a signed contract is mostly a suggestion. Baseball, basketball and hockey guarantee the money. Football guarantees a signing bonus and a prayer. That gap only survives because the players keep agreeing to it, and that is starting to crack. Once one quarterback got a fully guaranteed deal, the ceiling moved for everyone, and every agent now points at it. The owners call it fiscal responsibility. It is really just leverage, and leverage shifts. The bodies in this sport break faster than in any other, which is the exact reason the pay should be locked in, not the reason it is not. The next collective bargaining fight is where this lands, and the players have public opinion on their side, plus a real precedent already on the books: [Deshaun Watson's fully guaranteed deal](https://www.sportico.com/leagues/football/2024/deshaun-watsons-massive-contract-cleveland-browns-hamstrung-1234821989/), which the reporting shows has hamstrung a team for years, proof it's a real financial commitment, not a gesture. Non-guaranteed deals are a historical accident, not a law of the sport.

THTyler Hoffman· 4w 2 1

#nfl#overtime#rules

The NFL's overtime rule still isn't fair, and the 2022 fix didn't go far enough

The NFL changed the overtime rule in 2022 so both teams are guaranteed a possession if the team that wins the coin toss scores a touchdown on the opening drive. That fixed the most egregious version of the problem, a team could previously win the toss, march down the field, score, and the other offense never even touched the ball in a de facto sudden death that only one side got to participate in. But it only fixed that one specific scenario. If the first team scores a field goal instead of a touchdown, the second team gets the ball down by three with zero possessions banked, which is still a real advantage tied directly to a coin flip, not to anything either team did on the field. The cleanest fix is still the one nobody wants to actually implement, guarantee both teams at least one possession regardless of what happens on the first one, the way college football effectively does with its format. The NFL keeps making incremental tweaks around a coin toss advantage that a full guaranteed-possession rule would just eliminate outright.

THTyler Hoffman· 4w 2 3

#nfl#records#schedule

The 17th game turned the NFL record book into a mess and the league just shrugged

I know nobody wants to hear this during a fun season, but adding a seventeenth regular-season game quietly broke the record book. Every single-season number now sits in a different context from every record that came before it, passing yards, touchdowns, sacks, receptions, all of it. A player can put up a record on an extra game of opportunity that the old legends never got. Either you asterisk the modern marks or you pretend a sixteen-game season and a seventeen-game season are the same thing, and both options are ugly. The league added the game for the money, which is fine, they are a business, but they never once seriously addressed what it does to the history of the sport. If you care about comparing eras, and plenty of us do, [The Ringer's breakdown of the 17-game season's record-book impact](https://www.theringer.com/2021/03/31/nfl/nfl-17-game-season-single-season-records) shows exactly how apples-to-oranges the leaderboards have become. They should at least split the lists by era.

THTyler Hoffman· 1mo 2 2

#nfl#american-football

The read-option is basically dead in the NFL, and that's fine

Everyone panicked about the read-option a decade ago like it would break the league. Instead defenses adjusted the way they always do: assign a defender to the quarterback, stay disciplined on the mesh point, and make the QB take the hit. Now it survives only as a change-up, not a base offense. That's not a failure of the concept, it's just how the NFL works. Any scheme that leans on a numbers trick gets solved once coordinators see enough tape. The offenses that last are the ones built on spacing and personnel you can't out-scheme. The read-option was a phase, and phases are healthy. [Sports Illustrated's read-option obituary](https://www.si.com/nfl/2013/09/11/redskins-49ers-packers-read-option-dead) charted exactly how defenses caught up.

THTyler Hoffman· 1mo 1 333