In Depth look - Dropped Passes around the NFL in 2012

By Dave Brown | dave@nflen.com | Tweet #NFLEN

Eagles receiver Jeremy Maclin drops a pass...

It's a passing league, I keep hearing that. Well, we could look at that the other way too, and it might be the dropped ball league. Some passes will be thrown away, some will be knocked down, some thrown badly, and some are just flat out dropped.

That's what I want to look at, the dropped passes.

The table on the left is just a basic dropped passes table. Maybe you have seen this around the net before, maybe not. It's a basic indicator of dropped passes, but I think we need to look much deeper to get a clear idea of what dropped passes really mean.

There were 945 passes that were dropped by receivers in the NFL in the 2012 regular season, an average of 29.53 drops per team.

Cowboys, Redskins will lose cap space after NFL penalties

Prior to the uncapped year, the NFL competition committee warned teams that punishment would be levied for taking advantage of the circumstances. What they didn't want to see happen in an uncapped year was to have teams spending massive amounts of money on free agents, taking advantage. The Redskins and Cowboys were the most egregious offenders, as they dumped huge base salaries to players such as DeAngelo Hall, Albert Haynesworth and Miles Austin into the 2010 season in order to get the big numbers in those deals off the books while there was no cap.

Now, they'll pay, as the NFL has decided to penalize them by reducing cap space and spreading that extra money to the other teams that complied with the warning.