How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love The Punt
In Defense of the Lowest Scoring Season in Recent Memory
“This is gonna be some sicko shit.”
That was a sentence I saw at least 5 people tweet about the Week 10 Thursday Night Football matchup between the then 2-7 Chicago Bears and 1-7 Carolina Panthers, at the time arguably the two worst teams in football. By all accounts, the game lived up to its dreadful expectations, as both the Panthers’ and Bears’ anemic offenses aimlessly stumbled up and down Soldier Field for 60 minutes to produce a tepid final score of 16-13. Only one offensive touchdown was scored the entire night. The Panthers, as was par for the course for them this season, played especially hideous football, as Bryce Young graciously excused himself from providing even the briefest flashes of brilliance that fans usually hone in on to defend otherwise lifeless rookie quarterbacks. Tyson’s Bagent’s 162 yards and zero touchdowns were enough to carry the Bears to victory in a game that most neutral NFL fans likely didn’t bother to turn on. An all around pungent, hard-on-the-eyes affair between two teams that had lost over 3 times as many games as they had won.
It also wouldn’t crack the top five ugliest games played in the NFL this season.
As the 2023 season has worn on, its become renowned for being one of the lowest scoring and grimiest football years in recent memory. The reason for the dearth of points has been well documented at this point, as everything from the increased effectiveness of defensive schemes, to the record number of injuries to starting QBs, are pointed to as the reason why no NFL teams can seem to put up any points. Whatever the reasons are, the 2023 season has had its own Oscars “In-Memoriam” reel of hideous football games. Chicago would top its ugly win against the Panthers with an even uglier 12-10 defeat of the Minnesota Vikings a few weeks later, a game with a total of 6 turnovers played on primetime for everyone to see. The entire NFC South seems hell-bent on trying to lose football’s worst division. The spiraling Patriots, eventually forced to bench frustrated-to-the-point-of-not-giving-a-shit QB Mac Jones, put up an all time stinker in a 6-0 loss to the equally disappointing Chargers. As I’m writing this, the Minnesota Vikings and Las Vegas Raiders are deadlocked in a 0-0 tie in the 4th quarter, something I don’t think I’ve EVER seen. Both Josh Allen and Patrick Mahomes have had uncharacteristically down years marred by mistakes and offensive dysfunction. Scoring is down all across the league, all over the place.
Again, the reasons WHY football has gotten so gross has been well written about, by people who know far more about the sport than I do. I’m not here to explain WHY. What I want to do is argue that this shift is not necessarily a bad thing. I want to use the so-called “worst” games of the year to explore why I have genuinely enjoyed this season of football.
As I’ve been writing this piece, I’ve used a lot of words like “ugly” or “gross” to describe some of the lowest scoring football of the 2023 season- but I’ve been very careful not to say bad, because as dry as some of these games are I wouldn’t be being honest if I argued that they were outright boring to watch. In my list of examples of 2023’s lowest-scoring mudfights, there was always one constant- these games were CLOSE. Bears/Panthers might have been ugly, but I sure have fonder memories of that game then the 41-7 shellacking Chicago received at the hands of the Chiefs in September. The Patriots smothering at the hands of the Chargers is certainly preferable to the 34-0 beatdown they received from the Saints earlier in the year. There’s genuine value in watching a game where both teams are so mistake-prone and inept offensively that they generate equal-amounts of non-momentum. In games where points have come at a premium across the board, I’ve found myself biting my nails just as much in games that couldn’t hit an over/under of 30 as I have in haymaker-stacked fireworks displays. It isn’t the same type of enjoyment, but in the same way you can’t wrench your eyes away from a train derailment, there’s something entrancing about a game where neither QB could throw a ball into a black hole.
I think, specifically, it’s the lack of points that have been scored this season that make every touchdown seem more exciting this year. When you’re only getting one touchdown per game, you end up cherishing every trip to the red zone that much more- the same way you treasure your ammunition in a horror game that limits you to only firing 10 times in a level. When Justin Fields hit DJ Moore for a 30 yard strike that put Chicago in field goal range for the final time against Minnesota, I was that much more excited, because based on his sloppy, fumble-prone play all quarter, I was that much more sure he wouldn’t be able to do it. The value of watching these kinds of games come from how surprised you are when those sparse points finally do show up. It’s a shock to what your expectations have been the past 4 quarters.
You can make the same argument about the 6-0 Chargers/Patriots game. The Patriots offense was effectively inoperable all game long. But because NEITHER team could score all day, I kept watching this mangled Frankenstein of an offense limp through the game because I knew that it would only take one broken play or well scripted drive for it to be ENOUGH for New England to win. Again, this is also true of the 10-7 Patriots vs Giants game in which the Patriots choked away a chance at overtime off a missed Chad Ryland field goal. Is there not entertainment value in watching a team come so close to victory and then get cheated, seemingly by the spite of god? Is there not genuine value in seeing the titanic dynasty of the 21st century reduced to a cosmic joke, ALMOST beating an equally disastrous Giants team and still falling short? Even if you strip away the surrounding context, even if you don’t take into account the towering heights that the Patriots have fallen from, I watch from the edge of my seat at what might seem like a sure field goal in a 42-40 game, because I know just how hard it has been to come across any points this game.
As I write this, the Vikings and Raiders are currently locked into a 0-0 tie deep into the fourth quarter. 0-0! I have never ONCE seen that happen in a football game, and just as I was over the moon cheering for the Rams and Chiefs to stack up score after score during their classic 2018 showdown, I am every bit as invested in seeing this godawful fucking mess of a football game. Going into overtime at 0-0? Awesome. Having the one score of the game end up being a walkoff that ends it? Also spectacular! There is genuine excitement in value in hoping for or praying against points in a game that has seen so few of them. It is the lack of points that makes each touchdown taste all the sweeter.
I also think these low scoring games are necessary as a shift in the NFL’s trend toward scoring. Just as well documented as this season’s offensive slowdown is the decade long trend of more and more points being scored. The 2010s were a hallmark decade for offenses across the league, it felt like points and yardage records were being broken week in and week out. I can’t speak for everyone, but I don’t like seeing the same thing happen every season over and over again. A season like 2023, with slower offenses and defenses like the Ravens and Browns crushing opposing QBs, was necessary to put some clamps on the never-ending ascendance of NFL offenses. I don’t want to see every single game ending with a minimum of 50 points.
In the 80’s (at least I think, I wasn’t alive) QBs like Dan Marino were so impressive because it was so much harder to carry offensive drives the way QBs like Marino could. Now, the dominance of 2023 defenses and muddy, sludge-covered games feel important for the exact same reason- its such a break from what the NFL has conditioned viewers to expect over the course of the past decade. As points continue to accumulate and records continue to break, those high-scoring offensive track meets make less and less of an impact as they become more and more common. I know, when those high scoring games inevitably become the norm again, I’ll enjoy them more because they aren’t the same thing I’ve been watching all of last season.
I won’t say I can’t understand where detractors of this season are coming from. At the end of the day, points are exciting and its fun to see lots of them. But this brand of football, where every score feels like it had to be ripped from a defense with claws and teeth, is a refreshing change of pace from the status quo we’ve come to expect, and I find myself appreciating every 44 yard field goal all the more knowing that it could be the last one I see for the next 20 minutes. As a much younger NFL fan its not a brand of football I’m as familiar with, but I’m genuinely happy that in the last 15 years of offensive renaissance, we got a season where you have to bleed for every touchdown.