Cold Hard Football Facts: Welcome to the Golden Age of Passing era

By Kerry J. Byrne, Special to SI.com, ColdHardFootballFacts.com

Patriots quarterback Matt Cassel went from never starting a game in college to throwing for 400 yards in an NFL game twice. David Bergman/SI

Quarterbacks Matt Cassel and Matt Ryan are two of the big surprises of the 2008 season.

They're also the poster children for the Golden Age of the Passing Game, guys who have stepped into the role of starting NFL quarterback with no pro experience and played (with some exceptions) like seasoned old veterans of yore.

Cassel had not started a game since his high-school finale back in 1999, and threw for just 46 yards that day. Yet he passed for 400-plus yards in consecutive games last month and has a Patriots team decimated by injuries in the thick of the AFC playoff race.

Ryan's numbers are gaudy for a 23-year-old kid with 12 pro games under his belt: He's completed 61 percent of his passes for 2,625 yards, 13 TDs, just 6 INTs, an awesome 7.9 yards per attempt and a 91.2 passer rating -- all on a team that was a miserable 4-12 last year and boasts a first-year NFL head coach.

It's a far cry from the traditional coming-of-age story for NFL quarterbacks, who were expected to struggle for years while they adapted to the speed and picked up the intricacies of the pro game.

But it's also no surprise: after all, the game itself has changed dramatically over the decades, and those changes have only accelerated in recent years, making it easier than ever to pass the ball and easier than ever for new quarterbacks to have an immediate impact on their team.

In fact, the passing game is flourishing everywhere here in 2008, with the league's more experienced passers poised to rewrite the record books in several categories.

This year alone, not one but two players (Drew Brees and Kurt Warner) might surpass Dan Marino's single-season record of 5,084 passing yards. Several players, including ageless warhorse Brett Favre, meanwhile, have toyed with breaking the single-season record for completion percentage set by Ken Anderson in 1982 (70.55 percent). And in Dallas, Tony Romo has averaged a spectacular 8.36 yards per attempt in his short but notable career, which puts him on pace for the third highest average in the history of football (the NFL requires a min. 1,500 attempts to qualify for official records; Romo has attempted 1,157 passes).

So what gives?

Well, we haven't reached this era of prolific passing overnight. NFL rulemakers, not to mention offensive innovators, have been conspiring for decades to make it possible for quarterbacks to play as well as they do today. Quite frankly, most of the performances we're witnessing here in 2008 would not have been possible 30, 20 or even 10 years ago.

In fact, if you want to see how much the game has changed over the decades, and how easy it is for quarterbacks today, follow our brief, annotated history of the NFL passing game, from the Stone Age to the Golden Age.

The Stone Age (1920-1939)

The NFL's offensive Stone Age was marked by two key traits:

• One, teams rarely passed.

• Two, there was no quarterback position as we know it today: that is, there was no player designated as both the primary signal caller and the primary passer.

Back then, any player in the offensive backfield might have been called upon to pass the ball -- and then only rarely. In 1932, the first year for which the NFL has passing stats, Green Bay Hall of Fame back Arnie Herber led the league in almost every passing category: completing 37 of 101 passes for 639 yards and 9 TDs in 14 games -- about three games worth of work by today's standards.

If you're looking for a game that defined the Stone Age, look at the very first NFL championship game in 1933.

The Bears bested the Giants that day, 23-21, behind the heroics of Bronko Nagurski. History remembers Nagurski as the all-purpose legend who's in the Hall of Fame for his exploits as a bruising running back, offensive tackle and defensive stud.

But on this day, it was his two touchdown passes that carried Chicago to victory. A two-TD day through the air was no small feat in 1933. After all, the Bears attempted just three passes the entire game.

The T Revolution (1940-49)

Offensive football began to take the shape we'd recognize today in 1940, with the advent of the T formation, a brand of football adapted from the college game. The T formation did two things:

• One, it put one player behind center.

• Two, it called on that player to handle the team's passing duties.

The T formation exploded onto the scene in the 1940 NFL championship game, when the Bears used it to crush the Redskins, 73-0, in the greatest blowout in NFL history.

In the skillful hands of Bears quarterback Sid Luckman, a former college halfback, the advantages of the T formation were apparent, though not everybody adopted it right away. As late as 1946, the NFL still produced all-purpose two-way players like Hall of Famer Bill Dudley, who led the Steelers that year in rushing, passing, punting, kicking, punt returning, kick returning, scoring, interceptions and fumble recoveries. Whew!

It even took football terminology a while to catch up with the on-field revolution: Washington's Slingin' Sammy Baugh is remembered as one of the great passers in NFL history and one of the first great quarterbacks. But newspapers of the day often referred to him as a halfback -- his traditional position (he even wore a halfback's number, 33).

Teams during the T Revolution began to pass the ball much more often, and with much greater effect. Baugh completed 70.3 percent of his passes in 1945, a mark surpassed only once since, and toyed with the first 3,000-yard passing season in 1947 (2,938 yards) -- more than doubling the greatest output of the 1930s (Philadelphia back Davey O'Brien passed for a then-record 1,324 yards in 1939).