Points per game over the last 40 years

[ArgoRavi]

Heading into the final two weeks of the regular season, the points per game in the league has climbed to over the 46 point mark (46.04) which means that the league is on pace for its lowest scoring season since 1985. Also, Steve Simmons has an interesting comparison between the CFL and NFL regarding this statistic:

OFFENCE EQUAL IN CFL AND NFL
Myth: There is more offence and more scoring in the CFL than the NFL. Maybe once upon a time that was a true. It isn’t anymore. The No. 1 offensive team in the CFL, the Calgary Stampeders average 29 points a game and 375 yards of offence. The No. 1 offensive team in the NFL, the Indianapolis Colts, average 31 points a game, 452 yards of offence.
Where the CFL has it over the NFL is in the return game — on kickoffs, punts and missed field goals. There is almost no kickoff return game in the NFL anymore.
But on offence alone, in terms of total yardage, nine NFL teams move the ball for more yards than do the Stampeders.
And it’s not just this season. Last year, Calgary led the CFL with 383 yards of offence per game. Seven NFL teams had more — including Peyton Manning’s Denver Broncos, who put up 457 yards of offence per game. There are more four- and five-receiver sets in the NFL than ever before — a clear copy of what the CFL has been doing for years.
What is close: The average scoring per team in the NFL and CFL is almost identical at 23 points per game this season and the worst teams, Ottawa in the CFL, Oakland and Jacksonville in the NFL, average just over 15 a game.

http://www.torontosun.com/2014/10/25...adian-athletes

[paulwoods13]

The trend of increasing offence in the NFL and decreasing offence in the CFL has been evident (and increasing in magnitude) for several seasons. In the 1980s and most of the 1990s there was no question the CFL was higher-scoring, with passing a much more important part of the game. That is no longer the case and has not been for the better part of a decade, at least. The NFL is now full of high-powered, pass-oriented offences, and some NFL teams manage to run more offensive plays per game than CFL teams do, despite the fact that they have a 40-second clock and ours is a 20-second clock. IMO the CFL could regain its offensive dominance if it would fix the current clock rules -- i.e. go back to what we used to have -- but there is no way that will happen because the games would be four hours long. The difference is all the commercial breaks -- there are way more than there were 30 years ago, and unfortunately that is never going to change.