The 2nd touchdown of Ken Stabler’s career came in mop up duty at the end of a blowout in 1972 against the Oilers. With the Raiders up 27-0 on Monday Night Football, Stabler threw a one-yard touchdown off of play-action late in the fourth quarter.

A month later, Mike Ditka caught a 1-yard touchdown pass from Craig Morton to put the Cowboys up 24-0 against the Chargers in the first half. In December, Denver’s Charley Johnson found Haven Moses for a 1-yard touchdown in the first half against the Chiefs.

Why am I reviewing some random 1-yard touchdown throws from 1972? Well, I’m not reviewing some random 1-yard touchdown passes from 1972; I just finished reviewing all of them. That’s right: there were just three touchdown passes of one yard in the entire 1972 season.

For some perspective, consider that there have been two games in NFL history with three 1-yard touchdowns! One was this game between the Jaguars and Texans in 2012 when James Casey and Garrett Graham caught 1-yard touchdowns from Matt Schaub, and Marcedes Lewis caught a 1-yarder from Chad Henne. The other came between the Steelers and Broncos, when Jay Cutler threw one-yard touchdowns to Cecil Sapp and Tony Scheffler, while Ben Roetlhisberger opened up the scoring with a 1-yarder to Heath Miller.

The graph below shows the number of 1-yard touchdown passes in the NFL (or the AAFC or AFL) during each season since 1946. The chart is as jarring any you’ll ever see about the evolution of the passing game:

To be fair, there are 512 games in the modern NFL regular season, but were only 144 when there were 12 teams and 12-game seasons. If we pro-rate each season to 512 games, would that flatten the curve? I thought it might, but as it turns out, it doesn’t do too much to minimize the sharpness:

Okay, you’re thinking, but what about 1-yard TD passes as a percentage of all TD passes? Well, the effect has risen sharply there, too.

Nearly 8% of all touchdown passes last year were of the 1-yard variety. By historical measure, that’s insane. Here’s some more perspective: