What is a true sign that offenses are getting better?
Scoring is up, but that could also be part of the runoff inevitably produced by rules changes. Completions and completion percentage are up, but the rise of certain run-pass option concepts has made the short passing game a larger part of every team’s offense.
One analyst I was recently talking to suggested “explosive plays.” Teams almost universally use the term, though the criteria for what amounts to an explosive play aren’t universal. For the sake of this exercise, we used Pro Football Reference’s play finder database and filtered for every play from 2000 to 2018 that was between 20 and 99 yards long, then sorted by year.