* Defensive Focus Evolution over S2-S11

[majesiu]

After a convo from Discord ~two weeks ago, I got an idea for this article and finally reminded myself about it. I ignored season 1 in deliberations - the league was just starting with only 6 teams back then.


Let's start with the theoretically most stable stat of them all, with an exception of season 5, that I have no idea what caused a sudden decrease of tackles of that season - slow style of play may be, really low completion rate?


From the tackles for loss chart, we can easily see when offensive lines switch happened, finally allowing run game to thrive.


I thought we would see similar results with sacks as with TFLs, but oh well, while it limited them we had a huge outliner in S7 - I was just starting in the league but wasn't it the year that forced limited option for Blitzes Strategy?


The category, because of which I died a little inside because numbers got visibly lower when I played CB and started to go back a little up when I switched to the WR (obviously that's not the reason unless you believe in pirates <-> global warming inversed correlation). You can also easily see it was far easier to rack up ints in first 5 seasons against inferior QBs back in the day, you simply don't see any nearly as bad nowadays.


The most eye-pleasing chart, showing that secondary and coverage is getting better over the years. Or that you need to deflect the pass/force the drop in this sim to be effective DB, otherwise WR is going to drag you 30 yards after the catch even if you are glued to him.


OL effect visible in full display yet again. QBs getting smarter and smarter also play a role in limiting the number of safeties to just 2 last season.


The flashiest of them all categories shows a really high correlation with interceptions (duh) and similarly the records for this category were established by S1 and are likely unbreakable.

That's it, I'll probably make some edition of defensive stats with the weirdest single-season team results too.
Sheet Link

[timeconsumer]

Very cool. I think the loss of TFLs could be attributed to having fewer active DL than in the past. The PD chart I also find very interesting. I think INTs and TDs might just be noise over a small sample size.