Introduction
Excelsior here, back again with another project, but this one is going to be a little more detailed and statistical, or so I tell myself. Hopefully the title has your interest piqued, I try and put as much clickbait in there as I can. I’ve had this project in mind for a while now but got time to do it recently.
The historical eras in the ISFL have always interested me. I did almost 2 dozen game reviews, spanning across almost all the seasons. I reviewed some key games and did a lot of index-browsing well within a few weeks of joining the league. The historical data part of this league fascinated me and I wanted to make sure it was preserved and acknowledged somehow. Browsing across all these different seasons and indexes I usually checked who led the league in passing yards and rushing yards and such and noticed a lot of variation throughout the years. That’s to be expected, as the league grows and changes, with new players and positional eligibility rules. Even with that, I wanted to document all these different statistics, and this is the culmination of that ambition. I wanted to keep track of all the different eras of the ISFL.
Now, what exactly do I mean by this? The league average is constantly changing, with stats like passing yards dropping historically from the very early seasons, as no one has been able to reach the level of dominance as those early QBs have (looking at you Mike Boss). I believe it’d be beneficial to map out all these average statistics across the league and analyze them throughout the years. So yes, I will go through the painstakingly slow task of taking the average of each league metric and presenting it to you in a graph so you, as the reader, can determine the “eras” of the ISFL. I’ll provide my own conclusion after I map out all this data. I’ll try and get every single metric, from passing yards to TFLs to XPs made. This article will just cover RBs and QBs, however.
This should definitely help some people understand the idea of “eras” better for career statistical yards and realize that some of these records are just unbeatable, but you could still be the best at your position in your own time. The sack record is probably never going to get broken, but you can still get pretty damn close if you have a legendary season. I think it’s great to look at stats comparatively and not quantitatively. HoF voting will be influenced a lot by what “era” you played in, because career stats could be heavily skewed. So, for those of you who don’t think you have what it takes or maybe your player isn’t on trajectory for those record-breaking numbers, relax and rejoice, for there is hope.
Before we get into all the graphs, I just need one graph at the very top so everyone can see it and reference it.
Now take this into account every time you view one of the graphs I am about to show you.
Passing
Up first we have passing yards. It’s possible, as always, that there is some human error, so go back and check all my work if you feel so inclined to. I used each team’s starting QB, except for like S22, where Chicago had some issues with their QB I believe who ended up getting traded midway through the season? I just left out that QB not to skew the graphs, but in the early seasons each team had more than 1 QB, so I just included the starting QB’s passing yards, which is why S1 is so low. I think it’s quite an interesting trend, skyrocketing to almost 4500 avg yards, and then declining, staying stagnant, declining again, peaking and then dropping a bunch after S13. The graph stays stable for a solid like 6 seasons from S15-S21 before expansion comes and ruins everything. It’ll be interesting to look at some other metrics
Passing TDs and Passing yards actually have a solid correlation, with passing TDs just being a bit more random, which is to be expected, as the volume is so low, it’s a lot more luck based, I’d say. But there’s still the same relative trends we saw with passing yards. S5 was a crazy season apparently, and for some reason after S14, the league quality of play just started decreasing, right before expansion too. Again, same disclaimers apply like I introduced in the previous paragraph.
Apologies, up to this point I was rounding my numbers like an idiot, so this graph for passing TDs is a bit rough, should probably have gone to 1 decimal place in my graph so it looked a bit more accurate, but from now on that’s how it’s going to be.
Look at that nice, round graph, which had values rounded to one decimal place. We have this nice initial curve in the early seasons, and then the numbers start to fluctuate. We can see overall that interceptions have gone down over time, despite going up in recent seasons.
Here we have passing completion%, which was a but bumpy for the first 10 seasons and then became really stable, rounding off at an average of somewhere around 57% all time. This one isn’t that exciting, but what we can take away is that despite passing yards changing a bunch, passing % didn’t which means, QBs were probably just throwing the ball more? Well, let’s look at the next graph.
This is a really interesting graph. It definitely has some correlation to passing yards, but as we can see, the overall amount of passing attempts was actually super high early on, during these 14 game seasons. It decreased once we switched to 13 game seasons, and it kept decreasing, and then once expansion hit, and we got the 16 game schedules, the value skyrocketed back to the prehistoric days.
So, passer rating has historically gone up, and we can see a few trends here. This graph is actually quite interesting. We see peaks in S5, S8, S14 and S21. The two later ones were 1-2 seasons right before expansion, and every time it peaks, it drops off a lot, and then slowly goes back up. The first few seasons follow that same trend of every single stat growing and then peaking in S5 and then it becomes erratic for the next few, and then completely stable. S22 messed up a bunch of stuff and definitely tanked the average rating for a bit. In the early years, a lot of the QBs were playing well, but there were always 1-2 QBs who were always so below everyone else in terms of passer rating, that it also tanked the average. You don’t see that many outliers as things start to stabilize in later seasons. People like Pierno who threw for 35 ints in a season, definitely brought down the average a lot more, skewing the data almost. The set is too short to use a median however, so this is the best we have.
Eras of the QB
The Development Era - S1-S5 - This era is where QB stats should definitely be taken with a grain of salt, because of how rapid everything was changing. People were chucking the ball, and I mean chucking it, for TDs and INTs alike. S5 was the peak of this QB frenzy, with QBs averaging around 32 passing TDs that season!
The Chuck it Era - S6 - S15 - This era is where things get a little bit crazy. Teams are throwing a lot, and QBs are getting a LOT of yards. It was pretty unstable as some years the QBs did really well and then the next year they all flopped, but this is where the majority of your passing yards come from.
10 Team Era - S16 - S21 - This era was pretty stable in term of the total QB stats compared to all the other eras. Not much production in passing as defensive players got better and better. There were also only 13 games.
Modern Era - S22 - S26 - Passing is revived! After the slump in the ten team era, huge new draft classes and expansion bring back the age of passing as we see passing attempts skyrocket, along with yards and TDs. This can also be attributed to more games, but also because of the new skill at QB. This is where you have some of the old GOATs still going, like Bigsby, McDummy, Cole and Armstrong, and mixed in with some new talent like Cue and Phoenix. Towards the end of this era you have QBs like the Jack brothers, Skywalker, Fujiwara, O’Donnell, Ramza and Slothisberger all on the rise.
Rushing
Ok, so when going through all these stats, I had to decide on a method to organize it. I decided to base it off of the number of teams. If there were 10 teams at the time, I took the top 10 of that category of rushers. So it wasn’t the same people across each category. If there were 14, I would take the top 14. I thought this was the most balanced way to do this, and I’m happy with how the graphs came out. I think it is an accurate metric of how the rushing economy evolved over time.
So I split up the graph into QB rushers and non-QB rushers, and we had some weird people in there, like free safeties and DTs and stuff, so I decided that non-QB was a good enough of a blanket term. Rushing started out pretty weak especially for the first 5 seasons, which was the opposite of how passing performed in the initial 5 seasons. That’s to be expected to some extent. Teams are throwing more now. But then S6 rolls around and rushing attacks have been revitalized, QBs and RBs ran for a LOT. We see the QB rushing yards might have just been an anomaly, but at least they broke out of their shell of averaging under 50 yards per season. QBs are actually mobile from this point onward. RBs keep growing and growing, and they finally peak in S10, with the help of old rushing legends like Marquise Brown. After this peak, rushing attacks just aren’t as strong anymore, and continues to decrease through the S16 expansion, but after a sudden drop in S18, rushing yards seem to be stabilized. QBs have become more and more effective rushing the ball, continuing to grow, occasionally hitting an anomalistic peak and then decreasing for a while. Rushing yards seem to round out and there isn’t anymore sudden changes.
Side note: After doing further graphs and research on S10, I realized that the primary reason for the really high number is because of the way I calculate the rushing yards, I said I would take the top 8 RBs, because there were 8 teams, and then dissect the statistics from them. Well, this was the only season where we only had exactly 8 rushers over 100 attempts, because every single team only had 1 primary back. In most years some teams have some players split carries, which brings down the average, but this doesn’t necessarily mean that this year there was a lot more rushes than the other seasons, it’s just a problem with how I presented my data. I still believe that this is the best way to sort through the averages, instead of going by team.
Just like passing yards and passing TDs, there is a strong correlation between rushing yards and TDs, unlike any of any other categories. S26 was also uncharacteristically high, going over 10 average TDs for the first time since S12, which you can thank Toriki for, with her 19 TDs helping push this over. There was a huge slump in S5, which was also the year with a huge spike in passing TDs, so you can see the metrics are understandable inversely related.
Note: The value for Non-QB rush yards for S24 is 4.23, which is covered for some reason by the QB rush yards value.
[After reading this article again, and this is after the article has been graded, I realized I forgot to tell you how I calculated this metric for RBs. I only used RBs with > 100 carries, and took the top 6/8/10/12/14 RBs YPC, depending on the season. Totally forgot about that, but for people looking back on this article this should be relevant]
Wow, I know, that’s a lot to take in. This graph got pretty messy because of the QB rush yards, which, I would say, take with a grain of salt. I used every single starting QB for this, which also meant that there were some pretty lucky QBs who ran like 5 times but ran it for like 50 yards, boosting their YPC a bunch. I still think it’s pretty accurate, but even then, take it with a grain of salt. It’s probably not the best representation of how QB YPC evolved throughout time, but this is what I have. S6 is such a weird anomaly in the history of QB rushes, as you can clearly see on this graph, it was way ahead of its time. Rushing YPC started out the opposite of how passing statistics fared, with it decreasing initially and then making a bounceback after, peaking from S11-S14. Surprisingly, S10 wasn’t even that high, despite having the most avg rushing yards by a large margin.
Ok, so no surprise there. S10 is at the top. This graph pretty much mimics the first graph, related to rushing yards. YPC barely changed except for the first few years so this makes sense. S16 didn’t do much, but again, S22 had a big effect, with expansion. There were a lot of bumps in the beginning, but it evens out over time. What I find interesting is the amount of rush attempts in early seasons, like S2-4, despite the YPC being extremely low. The rushing yards actually go up despite the YPC dropping like a tank, because the rushing attempts skyrocket
Eras of the Running Back
The Mostly Ground, Not a Lot of Pound Era - S1-S5 - This era is signified by low YPC, lots of rushing attempts, and mediocre rushing yards, meaning teams were just feeding the backs, but with little success.
The Running is Easy Era - S6 - S13 - This era is the peak of running backs, with all metrics peaking during this era. RBs were most dominant during this period and this is where a lot of the all time rushers come from.
The Let’s Take it Slow Era - S14 - S18 - This era ties in with the next, as a transitional era, where we add 2 more teams and get used to the new rules and such. This is a down period for RBs, with the overall rushing yards going down. The YPC and number of TDs stay decent, but overall offense takes a hit during this era, passing and rushing-wise.
The Modern Era - S19 - S26 - This era has the most normal stats, which have remained pretty neutral, not much changing except for the number of rushing TDs, which in itself is pretty random, at least, compared to more stable measurements like rushing yards and attempts.
Closing Notes
This was just part 1 of a series I want to make for every position. Yes, even that one. If anyone has any suggestions as to which way I should collect my data to make it an even more accurate representation of how the league has evolved in specific areas like passing, receiving, rushing, please tell, because my methods are probably not the best. Also, if you see any clear and obvious mistakes, do point it out. I’ve been working for a while on this today and there’s bound to be some error, somewhere. I was planning to do some serious eras, instead of these like, humorous ones, but that’ll be reserved for the series finale, when I have all my data in front of me. I need defensive statistics to make some clearcut decisions on what defines an era, as well as some background information on what rule changes happened to prompt these changes in certain statistics, and I joined this league recently, so I wouldn’t have much knowledge on that front.
Note for grader: This article took a LONG time to make, the charts themselves taking several hours to collect all the data from. Hopefully I get a big fat bonus when the grader grades this.
Excelsior here, back again with another project, but this one is going to be a little more detailed and statistical, or so I tell myself. Hopefully the title has your interest piqued, I try and put as much clickbait in there as I can. I’ve had this project in mind for a while now but got time to do it recently.
The historical eras in the ISFL have always interested me. I did almost 2 dozen game reviews, spanning across almost all the seasons. I reviewed some key games and did a lot of index-browsing well within a few weeks of joining the league. The historical data part of this league fascinated me and I wanted to make sure it was preserved and acknowledged somehow. Browsing across all these different seasons and indexes I usually checked who led the league in passing yards and rushing yards and such and noticed a lot of variation throughout the years. That’s to be expected, as the league grows and changes, with new players and positional eligibility rules. Even with that, I wanted to document all these different statistics, and this is the culmination of that ambition. I wanted to keep track of all the different eras of the ISFL.
Now, what exactly do I mean by this? The league average is constantly changing, with stats like passing yards dropping historically from the very early seasons, as no one has been able to reach the level of dominance as those early QBs have (looking at you Mike Boss). I believe it’d be beneficial to map out all these average statistics across the league and analyze them throughout the years. So yes, I will go through the painstakingly slow task of taking the average of each league metric and presenting it to you in a graph so you, as the reader, can determine the “eras” of the ISFL. I’ll provide my own conclusion after I map out all this data. I’ll try and get every single metric, from passing yards to TFLs to XPs made. This article will just cover RBs and QBs, however.
This should definitely help some people understand the idea of “eras” better for career statistical yards and realize that some of these records are just unbeatable, but you could still be the best at your position in your own time. The sack record is probably never going to get broken, but you can still get pretty damn close if you have a legendary season. I think it’s great to look at stats comparatively and not quantitatively. HoF voting will be influenced a lot by what “era” you played in, because career stats could be heavily skewed. So, for those of you who don’t think you have what it takes or maybe your player isn’t on trajectory for those record-breaking numbers, relax and rejoice, for there is hope.
Before we get into all the graphs, I just need one graph at the very top so everyone can see it and reference it.
Now take this into account every time you view one of the graphs I am about to show you.
Passing
Up first we have passing yards. It’s possible, as always, that there is some human error, so go back and check all my work if you feel so inclined to. I used each team’s starting QB, except for like S22, where Chicago had some issues with their QB I believe who ended up getting traded midway through the season? I just left out that QB not to skew the graphs, but in the early seasons each team had more than 1 QB, so I just included the starting QB’s passing yards, which is why S1 is so low. I think it’s quite an interesting trend, skyrocketing to almost 4500 avg yards, and then declining, staying stagnant, declining again, peaking and then dropping a bunch after S13. The graph stays stable for a solid like 6 seasons from S15-S21 before expansion comes and ruins everything. It’ll be interesting to look at some other metrics
Passing TDs and Passing yards actually have a solid correlation, with passing TDs just being a bit more random, which is to be expected, as the volume is so low, it’s a lot more luck based, I’d say. But there’s still the same relative trends we saw with passing yards. S5 was a crazy season apparently, and for some reason after S14, the league quality of play just started decreasing, right before expansion too. Again, same disclaimers apply like I introduced in the previous paragraph.
Apologies, up to this point I was rounding my numbers like an idiot, so this graph for passing TDs is a bit rough, should probably have gone to 1 decimal place in my graph so it looked a bit more accurate, but from now on that’s how it’s going to be.
Look at that nice, round graph, which had values rounded to one decimal place. We have this nice initial curve in the early seasons, and then the numbers start to fluctuate. We can see overall that interceptions have gone down over time, despite going up in recent seasons.
Here we have passing completion%, which was a but bumpy for the first 10 seasons and then became really stable, rounding off at an average of somewhere around 57% all time. This one isn’t that exciting, but what we can take away is that despite passing yards changing a bunch, passing % didn’t which means, QBs were probably just throwing the ball more? Well, let’s look at the next graph.
This is a really interesting graph. It definitely has some correlation to passing yards, but as we can see, the overall amount of passing attempts was actually super high early on, during these 14 game seasons. It decreased once we switched to 13 game seasons, and it kept decreasing, and then once expansion hit, and we got the 16 game schedules, the value skyrocketed back to the prehistoric days.
So, passer rating has historically gone up, and we can see a few trends here. This graph is actually quite interesting. We see peaks in S5, S8, S14 and S21. The two later ones were 1-2 seasons right before expansion, and every time it peaks, it drops off a lot, and then slowly goes back up. The first few seasons follow that same trend of every single stat growing and then peaking in S5 and then it becomes erratic for the next few, and then completely stable. S22 messed up a bunch of stuff and definitely tanked the average rating for a bit. In the early years, a lot of the QBs were playing well, but there were always 1-2 QBs who were always so below everyone else in terms of passer rating, that it also tanked the average. You don’t see that many outliers as things start to stabilize in later seasons. People like Pierno who threw for 35 ints in a season, definitely brought down the average a lot more, skewing the data almost. The set is too short to use a median however, so this is the best we have.
Eras of the QB
The Development Era - S1-S5 - This era is where QB stats should definitely be taken with a grain of salt, because of how rapid everything was changing. People were chucking the ball, and I mean chucking it, for TDs and INTs alike. S5 was the peak of this QB frenzy, with QBs averaging around 32 passing TDs that season!
The Chuck it Era - S6 - S15 - This era is where things get a little bit crazy. Teams are throwing a lot, and QBs are getting a LOT of yards. It was pretty unstable as some years the QBs did really well and then the next year they all flopped, but this is where the majority of your passing yards come from.
10 Team Era - S16 - S21 - This era was pretty stable in term of the total QB stats compared to all the other eras. Not much production in passing as defensive players got better and better. There were also only 13 games.
Modern Era - S22 - S26 - Passing is revived! After the slump in the ten team era, huge new draft classes and expansion bring back the age of passing as we see passing attempts skyrocket, along with yards and TDs. This can also be attributed to more games, but also because of the new skill at QB. This is where you have some of the old GOATs still going, like Bigsby, McDummy, Cole and Armstrong, and mixed in with some new talent like Cue and Phoenix. Towards the end of this era you have QBs like the Jack brothers, Skywalker, Fujiwara, O’Donnell, Ramza and Slothisberger all on the rise.
Rushing
Ok, so when going through all these stats, I had to decide on a method to organize it. I decided to base it off of the number of teams. If there were 10 teams at the time, I took the top 10 of that category of rushers. So it wasn’t the same people across each category. If there were 14, I would take the top 14. I thought this was the most balanced way to do this, and I’m happy with how the graphs came out. I think it is an accurate metric of how the rushing economy evolved over time.
So I split up the graph into QB rushers and non-QB rushers, and we had some weird people in there, like free safeties and DTs and stuff, so I decided that non-QB was a good enough of a blanket term. Rushing started out pretty weak especially for the first 5 seasons, which was the opposite of how passing performed in the initial 5 seasons. That’s to be expected to some extent. Teams are throwing more now. But then S6 rolls around and rushing attacks have been revitalized, QBs and RBs ran for a LOT. We see the QB rushing yards might have just been an anomaly, but at least they broke out of their shell of averaging under 50 yards per season. QBs are actually mobile from this point onward. RBs keep growing and growing, and they finally peak in S10, with the help of old rushing legends like Marquise Brown. After this peak, rushing attacks just aren’t as strong anymore, and continues to decrease through the S16 expansion, but after a sudden drop in S18, rushing yards seem to be stabilized. QBs have become more and more effective rushing the ball, continuing to grow, occasionally hitting an anomalistic peak and then decreasing for a while. Rushing yards seem to round out and there isn’t anymore sudden changes.
Side note: After doing further graphs and research on S10, I realized that the primary reason for the really high number is because of the way I calculate the rushing yards, I said I would take the top 8 RBs, because there were 8 teams, and then dissect the statistics from them. Well, this was the only season where we only had exactly 8 rushers over 100 attempts, because every single team only had 1 primary back. In most years some teams have some players split carries, which brings down the average, but this doesn’t necessarily mean that this year there was a lot more rushes than the other seasons, it’s just a problem with how I presented my data. I still believe that this is the best way to sort through the averages, instead of going by team.
Just like passing yards and passing TDs, there is a strong correlation between rushing yards and TDs, unlike any of any other categories. S26 was also uncharacteristically high, going over 10 average TDs for the first time since S12, which you can thank Toriki for, with her 19 TDs helping push this over. There was a huge slump in S5, which was also the year with a huge spike in passing TDs, so you can see the metrics are understandable inversely related.
Note: The value for Non-QB rush yards for S24 is 4.23, which is covered for some reason by the QB rush yards value.
[After reading this article again, and this is after the article has been graded, I realized I forgot to tell you how I calculated this metric for RBs. I only used RBs with > 100 carries, and took the top 6/8/10/12/14 RBs YPC, depending on the season. Totally forgot about that, but for people looking back on this article this should be relevant]
Wow, I know, that’s a lot to take in. This graph got pretty messy because of the QB rush yards, which, I would say, take with a grain of salt. I used every single starting QB for this, which also meant that there were some pretty lucky QBs who ran like 5 times but ran it for like 50 yards, boosting their YPC a bunch. I still think it’s pretty accurate, but even then, take it with a grain of salt. It’s probably not the best representation of how QB YPC evolved throughout time, but this is what I have. S6 is such a weird anomaly in the history of QB rushes, as you can clearly see on this graph, it was way ahead of its time. Rushing YPC started out the opposite of how passing statistics fared, with it decreasing initially and then making a bounceback after, peaking from S11-S14. Surprisingly, S10 wasn’t even that high, despite having the most avg rushing yards by a large margin.
Ok, so no surprise there. S10 is at the top. This graph pretty much mimics the first graph, related to rushing yards. YPC barely changed except for the first few years so this makes sense. S16 didn’t do much, but again, S22 had a big effect, with expansion. There were a lot of bumps in the beginning, but it evens out over time. What I find interesting is the amount of rush attempts in early seasons, like S2-4, despite the YPC being extremely low. The rushing yards actually go up despite the YPC dropping like a tank, because the rushing attempts skyrocket
Eras of the Running Back
The Mostly Ground, Not a Lot of Pound Era - S1-S5 - This era is signified by low YPC, lots of rushing attempts, and mediocre rushing yards, meaning teams were just feeding the backs, but with little success.
The Running is Easy Era - S6 - S13 - This era is the peak of running backs, with all metrics peaking during this era. RBs were most dominant during this period and this is where a lot of the all time rushers come from.
The Let’s Take it Slow Era - S14 - S18 - This era ties in with the next, as a transitional era, where we add 2 more teams and get used to the new rules and such. This is a down period for RBs, with the overall rushing yards going down. The YPC and number of TDs stay decent, but overall offense takes a hit during this era, passing and rushing-wise.
The Modern Era - S19 - S26 - This era has the most normal stats, which have remained pretty neutral, not much changing except for the number of rushing TDs, which in itself is pretty random, at least, compared to more stable measurements like rushing yards and attempts.
Closing Notes
This was just part 1 of a series I want to make for every position. Yes, even that one. If anyone has any suggestions as to which way I should collect my data to make it an even more accurate representation of how the league has evolved in specific areas like passing, receiving, rushing, please tell, because my methods are probably not the best. Also, if you see any clear and obvious mistakes, do point it out. I’ve been working for a while on this today and there’s bound to be some error, somewhere. I was planning to do some serious eras, instead of these like, humorous ones, but that’ll be reserved for the series finale, when I have all my data in front of me. I need defensive statistics to make some clearcut decisions on what defines an era, as well as some background information on what rule changes happened to prompt these changes in certain statistics, and I joined this league recently, so I wouldn’t have much knowledge on that front.
Note for grader: This article took a LONG time to make, the charts themselves taking several hours to collect all the data from. Hopefully I get a big fat bonus when the grader grades this.