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With their
lethal offense and league-worst defense, the Packers are a perfect
example of just how prominent the passing game is in today's NFL.
AP
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2011 NFL season by the numbers - Kerry J. Byrne - SI.com
The 2011 season will go down as the Year of the Passing Game, as records were shattered like Bourbon Street revelers after a Saints Super Bowl victory. We highlight 41 eye-popping passing numbers from the season below.
The numbers were so gaudy that they were unthinkable just a decade ago, let alone in the dark ages of NFL offense, back in the era of the Steel Curtain and the Doomsday Defense.
To understand how dramatically the game has changed in recent decades, you must take a step back to the 1970s, a decade in which defenses utterly dominated the NFL. The Cold, Hard Football Facts call it the Dead Ball Era. The dominance of defense peaked in 1977, when all but the greatest offenses had difficulty finding the end zone.
The average team scored just 17.2 points per game in 1977. Tampa Bay's offense, in its second year as an expansion team, totaled just 103 points in the 14-game season -- about 10 quarters of work in the Superdome for the 2011 Saints. Tampa's average of 7.4 PPG is a post-war record for futility and may never be seriously challenged again, though the Rams made an ignoble effort in 2011 (12.1 PPG).
Atlanta's defense surrendered just 129 points in 1977, a post-war record of 9.2 PPG. The average score of a Falcons game that season was a 13-9. Somewhere Bronko Nagurski beamed with pride.
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