League in Review: Are We Actually Seeing More Penalties? Are There Coverage Trends? Which Players Stand Out?

Seven weeks of the NFL are in the books, and that’s about enough time to get a sense of what the year looks like. What’s unique about 2026? Which teams are trying something new and which teams seem to be winning in traditional ways?

I wanted to look at the wealth of NFL data we have available to use right now and figure out if there was anything meaningful league-wide or for individual teams worth noting.

Outstandingly, 2026 seems unique in some critical ways.

We explore the penalty question, delve into league-wide blitz and pressure rates, identify changes in offensive and defensive production and look at which teams — and players — rank notably at the top or bottom of key statistics.

This piece includes over 20 charts exploring these trends in NFL play and performance highlights (or lowlights) of individual players.

Do you feel like penalties are more common this year? Very often, we can identify an issue that’s been bothering us, and recency bias makes us overcount the frequency of an event that really has been constant throughout the years.

Not so with penalties. We indeed do have more penalties per game this season through seven weeks than we’ve had since 2005.

Because I’ve been wiring a lot of data downloads into a personal database (the numbers above come from nflverse), I wanted to verify these statistics. I went to nflpenalties.com — a fantastic resource — and checked out their totals. For 2026, 2020 and 2009, the numbers were close enough to consider them checked out (less than 0.5 percent differences).

Not only are we seeing more penalties than we have in quite some time, but the difference in penalty frequency over the last few years is also significant! It’s about 0.4 more per team per game (or 0.8 total per game) than last year and one more than two years ago. 

Not too long ago, we saw the lowest penalty frequency ever — in part because no crowds meant less crowd noise — in 2020, and we’ve become pretty acclimated to a penalty environment where we see about 12 or 13 total penalties per game and now see something closer to 15.

So it’s not just that we have more penalties per game than ever; it’s by enough that it feels noticeable and clearly slows down the game.

Which penalties are driving it? As you might have expected, it’s not a universal increase in all penalty types; it’s driven more by specific penalties. One penalty type might suggest that referees are stricter about calling them, but the other suggests an operational error by teams:

After offensive holding — which may reflect a genuine increase in players using illegal technique or simply tighter refereeing — the second-largest increase in penalty type comes from delays of game. 

This theoretically could be stricter refereeing (the rules allow refs to call it any time after the play clock hits zero, but they often wait a beat), but is more likely teams simply not setting up in time. We’re also seeing a near-doubling in illegal shift penalties (another process one that doesn’t seem to rely on referee strictness).

The key takeaway to me, however, is that most penalties are experiencing an extremely modest bump in call rates, and it’s two or three penalties that seem to be getting most of the lift here; if just offensive holding and delays of game were called at the 2021-2025 rate, we’d be seeing the exact same penalty rate we experienced in 2013, which is to say below the average over the last 28 years.

Notably, a new penalty was added to the rulebook over the past few years: kickoffs landing short of the landing zone. That’s not called particularly often, however, and the incidence rate of that penalty actually decreased compared to last year. So, it can explain a small amount of the increase over 2021-2023 but not 2024 or 2025.

That was just through seven games of each season type. Did we see extremes moderate in those other seasons over time? Substantially, but the overall direction remained the same for the extreme seasons (2005, 2020).

Something else pops out this season: pressure rate is higher than it has ever been.

This is worth a write-up on its own that I’ll be exploring in much deeper detail, but for now, understand that we’re seeing substantial increases in pocket pressure beyond what quarterbacks are used to. And it’s not just because of blitzing.

One clue: we have the longest time to throw this season (2.86 seconds) and the lowest man-coverage rate (25.2 percent) since 2014.

The 2026 NFL season is characterized by penalties, pressure, long-lasting dropbacks and zone coverage.

Points Per Drive is up this season over historical averages. Over the last 28 seasons, this is the fourth-highest points-per-drive total in seven weeks at 2.19.

Some of this is driven by red-zone touchdown rate; teams are unusually efficient this year when they get inside the 20, and because field position is better than ever, so are trips to the red zone. At 61.5 percent of red zone trips turning into touchdowns, we’re at the fourth-highest red-zone touchdown rate in that 28-season set.

Some of it might also be driven by teams punting less often; fourth-down go rates are high and a product of the era; before 2020, teams went for it on fourth down between 10 percent and 14 percent of the time. 

In 2017, we hit a local minimum: 11.5 percent of fourth downs saw an attempt to convert, compared to 12.6 percent in both of the prior years. In 2018, that rose to 12.9 percent and then hit 14.4 percent in 2019.

That number jumped to 18.5 percent in 2020 and has stayed above 17 percent since then. We hit a local maximum in 2021 (20.0 percent) and then dropped in 2022 (18.8 percent) and 2023 (17.6 percent). In 2024, it rose to 19.5 percent and hit its highest rate ever last year at 22.0 percent. 

This year, there’s a slight dip from the prior two years to 20.1 percent.

Punting less often isn't driven only by fourth-down go rates. After all, the position on the field where coaches most often go for it on fourth down is often a field position that forces them to choose between kicking a field goal and attempting to convert a fourth down, not to decide between punting or attempting a conversion. 

Teams are punting less often for a lot of reasons, but one of them is because they have less distance to traverse before they get to that pivot point.

Starting field position has been better for offenses than ever. The average starting field position for an offense this year is 30.4 yards from one’s own end zone, the best offensive position since 2003 (30.9). Interestingly, field position was better in every year between 1999 and 2003.

It doesn’t take a genius to see why field position has spiked so much, especially since 2011, when we had our worst average starting field position (27.0 yards) — that year, the kickoff spot moved from the 30-yard line to the 35-yard line.

Since the new kickoff rule was introduced in 2024, average field position moved from 28.3 yards from one’s own end zone in 2023 to 29.9 yards in 2025. Tweaks, like the change in the touchback rule, fair catch rules and so on, have gradually helped move it up to 30.4 yards.

Also, the field goal decision point has moved as well, compressing the likelihood and acceptable distance from which to punt even further.

Over the last 28 seasons, we have seen the highest field goal attempt distance (41.8 yards on average) and highest field goal make distance (40.8 yards). This reflects both the rise of big-legged kickers and the increasing aggressiveness near the goal line; teams don’t kick short field goals as often anymore, and they kick long ones much more often.

It’s more the second than the first, but it is notable that we have a 28-year low in tries under 30 yards and a 28-year high in tries over 49 yards. Indeed, it looks like the lowest attempt rate since 1960 for kicks 29 yards and under and the highest attempt rate ever.

All of this — better field position, more capable kickers and more aggressive fourth downs — has produced the lowest five-year span of punts per drive in NFL history. The fewest punts belonged to 2025, followed by 2020, 2024, 2021, this year, 2022 and 2023.

The 13 personnel (one back, three tight ends) revolution you may have heard about — the Rams and Bills love to specialize in this — is real but overstated.

We’re seeing more three-tight end usage than in the history of this data, and a significant decrease in almost every other personnel package.

Using three different sources clouds things a bit, but when there is overlap (e.g., 2025 SumerLive and 2025 FTN), they generally agree.

You might think the teams that use two- and three-tight end sets more often are also the teams that invest the most in play-action. That doesn’t seem to be the case; the six teams that deploy tight ends the most often — the Bills, Rams, 49ers, Chargers, Dolphins and Cardinals — are randomly distributed across a ranked-order list of play-action usage.

We’re in a high-blitz environment (third-highest since 2008), so we’d expect to see much more Cover-1 and Cover-0, right? 

Not really. 

Cover-0 remains quite low at 2.8 percent of all coverages and is not notably higher or lower than our historical data (which goes back to 2017).

More interestingly, Cover-1 is at what seems to be the lowest rate we can find. Sports Info Solutions data goes back to 2015 but seems consistently reliable only from 2017 onward — and that shows a significant decline in Cover-1 usage from nearly 40 percent of snaps to 19.1 percent.

What has replaced it? Not Cover-3, the second-most common coverage in 2017 and one that rose in popularity until peaking in 2020 (around 31 percent). Cover-3 usage has remained consistent and hasn’t really changed since 2022 — usage is at 27.8 percent of snaps right now, and it has been about there for five years.

Instead, it’s the coverages we most associate with Vic Fangio’s tree: Cover-4 and Cover-6. Cover-4 rose from about 7 percent in 2017 to 19.5 percent in 2026, the highest we’ve ever seen it. Same with Cover-6, which rose from about 2 percent to 7.5 percent.

For those following the broader NFL story, it should be unsurprising to see which team has been the strongest outlier among the crowd when it comes to called plays.

The Minnesota Vikings have been blitzing at historic rates — enough that they may be the most blitz-happy team in NFL history as far as we can tell — and that has altered their rates in other, related statistics as well.