Analysis: NFL is still a passing league despite early rise in running

Sport

Analysis: NFL is still a passing league despite early rise in running

2024-09-27 18:10 Last Updated At：19:32

On Football analyzes the biggest topics in the NFL from week to week. For more On Football analysis, head here.

The NFL isn’t going back to old-school, smashmouth running football.

Even though rushing yards are up and passing numbers are down over the first three weeks of the season, it’s too soon to call it a new trend.

“It’s still early with the sample size,” Eagles coach Nick Sirianni said. “But it is something that we looked into because it is noticeable, and it is a really big difference. But we’ll continue to monitor that and what we are trying to do, though, is be efficient on offense. Hit your explosive plays. Take care of the football. Those things will never change. Not give up sacks.”

NFL teams are averaging 119.5 yards rushing per game, up from 112.7 last season. But the league average was 121.6 yards per game in 2022. Teams actually aren’t running more; they’re just having more success. Average rushing attempts per team per game this season going into Week 4 is 26.9 vs. 26.8 last year.

Twenty players are on pace for 1,000-yard rushing seasons. Twelve players accomplished that feat in 2023, down from 16 in 2022. There were only seven in 2021, the first year the NFL went to 17 games in the regular season.

Five teams are averaging 150 yards rushing per game and 13 are averaging 125. Only the Baltimore Ravens were above 150 in 2023 and nine teams averaged 125.

One reason why running backs are having better success is that more defenses are geared toward stopping the pass. They use lighter, more athletic linebackers and play two-high safeties. Offenses can be physical against those defensive sets and attack on the ground.

“You always try to keep defenses honest and they’re doing the same thing back to you, so it’s a little bit of a cat-and-mouse game on the number of people in the box,” Chiefs coach Andy Reid said. “It’s (the run game) been productive, so we’ve got good, positive yards from it.”

Even with Patrick Mahomes under center, Kansas City is only 12th in passing and 15th in rushing this season.

Overall, teams are averaging 201.2 yards passing per game, down from 218.9 last year. It’s the fewest yards since 2003 when the season average was 200.4.

Seventeen teams are averaging 200 yards passing per game, down from 22 last season. Ten teams are averaging 225, down from 16 last year. Only the Cowboys and 49ers are above 250 yards per game. Five teams reached that total last season.

Once defenses adjust and start to take away the run again, passing yards should increase.

“I do think that the sample size is small right now but there’s been a shift,” Titans coach Brian Callahan said of the run-pass ratio. “I think statistically, as you look at it, teams are more intently running the football than maybe they were two years ago. So yeah, I think you’re seeing a slight shift in process because it’s hard to throw the ball all over the place against some of these defenses and how they play, and they make you earn it and they put a lot on the quarterback to be able to complete seven, eight balls a drive for six to nine drives a game.

“We all understand the philosophy of what that means, and so I think the run game is something that is probably more in vogue now at this early part of the season than it was the last couple of years. I think the numbers would bear that out.”

Another reason why passing numbers are down beyond defensive strategy is the inexperience of quarterbacks. The average age of starting QBs in Week 1 was 27.6, the youngest during the Super Bowl era. In 2020, the average age was 29.5. Since then, Tom Brady, Drew Brees, Matt Ryan and Ben Roethlisberger have retired.

Plus, injuries may have contributed to the decline in passing so far. Miami's Tua Tagovailoa, who led the NFL in yards passing, has missed one start. Green Bay's Jordan Love has missed two games. Pittsburgh's Russell Wilson hasn't played.

NFL teams are paying quarterbacks a ton of money — Dak Prescott makes $60 million per season with Dallas and 15 others are earning at least $40 million — to win games throwing the football. Wide receivers are getting paid — 22 are earning at least $20 million per season — to catch passes and make big plays. It's a passing league.

The numbers will increase. It’s just a matter of time.

Prescott (221) and Daniel Jones (281 yards) combined for 502 yards passing on Thursday night in the Cowboys’ 20-15 win over the Giants. The two teams totaled 106 yards rushing.

It's already started to turn around.

AP Pro Football Writer Teresa M. Walker contributed to this report.

AP NFL: https://apnews.com/hub/nfl

Belgian PM and king blast Pope Francis for church's sex abuse cover-up legacy in blistering welcome

2024-09-27 19:22 Last Updated At：19:31

BRUSSELS (AP) — Belgium’s prime minister on Friday blasted Pope Francis for the Catholic Church’s horrific legacy of clerical sex abuse and cover-ups in his country, demanding “concrete steps” to come clean with the past and put victims’ interests first.

Alexander De Croo's blistering welcome speech at the start of Francis’ visit was one of the most pointed ever directed at the pope during a foreign trip, where the genteel dictates of diplomatic protocol usually keep outrage out of public remarks. But even King Philippe had strong words for Francis, demanding the church work “incessantly” to atone for the crimes and help victims heal.

Their tone underscored just how raw the abuse scandal still is in Belgium, where two decades of revelations of abuse and systematic cover-ups have devastated the hierarchy’s credibility and contributed to an overall decline in Catholicism and the influence of the once-powerful church.

Francis applauded at the end of De Croo’s speech and was expected to meet with victims in private later Friday. "This is our shame and humiliation,” he said in an improvised response.

“Today, words alone do not suffice. We also need concrete steps,” De Croo told Francis and an audience of royals, church officials, diplomats and politicians at Laeken Castle, the residence of Belgium’s royal family.

“Victims need to be heard. They need to be at the center. They have a right to truth. Misdeeds need to be recognized,” he said. “When something goes wrong we cannot accept cover-ups,” he said. “To be able to look into the future, the church needs to come clean on its past.”

Revelations of Belgium’s horrific abuse scandal have dribbled out in bits over a quarter-century, punctuated by a bombshell in 2010 when the country’s longest-serving bishop, Bruges Bishop Roger Vangheluwe, was allowed to resign without punishment after admitting he had sexually abused his nephew for 13 years.

Francis only defrocked Vangheluwe earlier this year, in a move clearly designed to remove a lingering source of outrage among Belgians before his visit.

Two months after Vangheluwe resigned, Belgian police staged what were then unprecedented raids on Belgian church offices, the home of recently retired Archbishop Godfried Danneels, and even the crypt of a prelate — a violation the Vatican decried at the time as “deplorable.”

Danneels was then caught on tape trying to persuade Vangheluwe’s nephew to keep quiet until the bishop retired. Finally, in September 2010, the church released a 200-page report that said 507 people had come forward with stories of being molested by priests, including when they were as young as 2. It identified at least 13 suicides by victims and attempts by six more.

Victims and advocates say those findings were just the tip of the iceberg and that the true scope of the scandal is far greater. Police eventually returned the documentation that was seized in the 2010 raids to the church, scuttling hopes for criminal investigations.

Despite everything that was known and already in the public domain, the scandal reared its head in a shocking new way last year, when a four-episode Flemish documentary, “Godvergeten” (Godforsaken) aired on public broadcaster VRT.

For the first time, Belgian victims told their stories on camera one after another, showing Flemish viewers the scope of the scandal in their community, the depravity of the crimes and their systematic cover-up by the Catholic hierarchy.

Amid the public outrage that ensued, both a Flanders parliamentary committee and Belgium’s federal parliament opened official inquests last year. A follow-on investigation announced this week will look into whether any external pressures led to the collapse of the criminal investigation.

Significantly, both King Philippe and De Croo made their toughest remarks about abuse in Dutch — the language spoken in the once-staunchly Catholic Flanders where the abuse cases have gained the most notoriety — while the more neutral parts of their speeches were delivered in French and German.

De Croo's speech was also outside typical Vatican protocol, which normally would have seen only the king address the pope. As occurred in Canada, when Prime Minister Justin Trudeau addressed the pope alongside the country's governor-general, De Croo's office requested that he be able to speak, officials said.

The pope also referred to abuse in his remarks, insisting that the church was “addressing firmly and decisively” the problem by implementing prevention programs, listening to victims and accompanying them to heal.

But after the astonishing dressing-down by the prime minister and king, Francis went off-script to express the shame of the church for the scandal and voice his commitment to ending it.

“The church must be ashamed and ask for forgiveness and try to resolve this situation with Christian humility and put all the possibilities in places so that this doesn’t happen again,” Francis said. "But even if it were only one (victim), it is enough to be ashamed."

Victims have demanded the church do far more, including implementing robust reparations programs to compensate them for their trauma and pay for the lifelong therapy many need. Some penned a letter demanding such a reparations program, which they planned to deliver to Francis in their private meeting.

The prime minister, king and pope also referred to a new church-related scandal rocking Belgium, over so-called “forced adoptions,” which echoed earlier revelations about Ireland's so-called mother and baby homes.

After World War II and through to the 1980s, many single mothers were forced by the Belgian church to offer their newborns up for adoption. Often the mothers barely saw their babies before nuns took them away, and the babies were then placed for adoption, with money changing hands.

For those adopted, it is close to impossible now to find their birth mothers, since the records have long ago disappeared.

Francis said he was “saddened” to learn of these practices, but said such criminality was “mixed in with what was unfortunately the prevailing view in all parts of society at this time.”

“Many believed in conscience that they were doing something good for both the child and the mother,” he said, referring to the social stigma of an unwed mother in a Catholic country. He prayed that the church would “bring clarity” to the problem.

When Francis met with survivors of Ireland's forced adoptions in 2018, he issued a sweeping apology on behalf of the church. It's an issue the Argentine pope understands well given Argentina’s own history of forced adoptions of children born to purported leftists during the 1970s military dictatorship.

Belgium's caretaker Justice Minister Paul Van Tigchelt has called the forced adoptions ’’horror practices by the church.” No formal figures are available, but the HLN media group that brought the issue to the fore again last year estimated it affected up to 30,000 people.

Associated Press religion coverage receives support through the AP’s collaboration with The Conversation US, with funding from Lilly Endowment Inc. The AP is solely responsible for this content.