On Saturday, I was the sideline reporter for the UW–Platteville Homecoming football game. Final score: UWP 49, UW–Eau Claire 27.

Three weeks ago, I announced Platteville High School’s 56–13 win over Richland Center. The Hillmen scored, believe it or not, the fewest points of the three winning teams in their conference that week.

I have also called a 48–45 Platteville loss and, two weeks ago, a 50–7 win, the same night as this epic: Oconomowoc 84, Wisconsin Lutheran 82. (No, that was not a basketball game. In fact, I predict that that football game will have more points than any high school basketball game in Wisconsin this year.)

Last season, Wisconsin locked up its third consecutive Rose Bowl trip by beating Nebraska in the Big Ten championship, 70–31. That came a year after Wisconsin beat Michigan State, 42–39 to win the first Big Ten title game. One season before that, the Badgers broke their single-game scoring record — which was set in 1962 — three times, with wins of 70–3, 83–20 and 70–23.

The Packers went 15–1 in the 2011 season despite the fact that they ranked 19th in the NFL in scoring defense and dead last in yardage given up. They were number one because they had the number one scoring offense in the NFL.

It seems a gross understatement to say that in football, the offense is ahead of the defense. That seems to be the case in every level of football, not just the pros.

One of my favorite football commentators, ESPN.com’s Gregg Easterbrook, has noticed:

Denver and Dallas played a contest with 99 points, 1,039 yards of offense and one punt. At 46 points per game, the Broncos are on a pace to score 736 points, which would pulverize the NFL season record of 589 points. At 490 offensive yards per game, they’re on pace to gain 7,840 yards, which would best the league record of 7,474.

And the Broncos are staring at the taillights of the Oregon Ducks and Baylor Bears! Baylor is averaging 71 points and 790 offensive yards per game; Oregon, 59 points and 630 yards. Saturday, Baylor gained 617 yards in the first half.

The offense surge is remarkable across football. A decade ago, the hot quarterback was the same — Peyton Manning — but no NFL team averaged more than 400 yards on offense. Today, Philadelphia’s 453-yard average is practically ho-hum. NFL average scoring per team per game has risen from 18.7 points two decades ago to 22.8 points in 2012 to 23.1 so far this season. The NFL scoring record came in 2007 (New England), the yardage record in 2011 (New Orleans). The NFL’s three best performances ever for first downs were in 2012 (New England), 2011 (New Orleans) and 2011 (New England). How many records will fall in 2013?

And the NFL is staring at the taillights of the NCAA! FBS scoring has risen from 20.6 points per game per team in 1972 to 28.3 points in 2012 to 30.4 points so far this season. The 122 schools of the FBS are averaging — averaging — 420 offensive yards gained. So far 19 big-time colleges average at least 500 yards per game. Roll in the FCS, Division II and Division III: All told, 69 colleges and universities are gaining more yards than the Denver Broncos. Even the small schools are making the scoreboard spin. Johns Hopkins, an elite academic college, is averaging 544 yards gained.

Broadly across football, rule changes that favor offense — tighter pass-interference regulations especially — are having the intended impact of increasing scoring. Coaches are putting their best athletes on offense, further shifting the balance. The 7-on-7 fad that began in the high school ranks around the year 2000 has led to college and pro players who spent endless hours in youth practicing passing the ball, and the way you get to Carnegie Hall is to practice, practice, practice. (Or to go on strike.) New emphasis on flagging helmet-to-helmet hits has made defenders a tad less aggressive, which benefits offense. …

But gaudy numbers have become the new normal in college play. College offensive lines have switched to wider spacing, which spreads out the spread and generates yards. NFL teams could spread their lines too, but this would expose the quarterback to more hits, and protection of the $50 million quarterback is essential in the long professional season.

The NCAA’s first-down rule — clock stops on each first down — is snaps-friendly. So is the NCAA preference for running the ball. This weekend, Baylor rushed 65 percent of the time, while Denver passes 60 percent of the time. In a quick-snap offense, running allows a faster pace: The line can reform more rapidly, the wide receivers don’t have to walk back a long distance. Max Olson notes that quick-snap rushing has allowed Baylor to score in two minutes or less 29 times in just four games. NCAA first-down rules and college rushing preference add up to more snaps, which increases yards. In the Baylor-West Virginia game, there were 170 offensive snaps; in the Denver-Dallas game, 127 snaps.

Ultimately, more snaps may account for the big offensive differentials in the NCAA versus the NFL. Dallas and Denver combined to average 8.2 yards per snap; Baylor and West Virginia, 7.4 yards per snap. But Baylor snapped 95 times versus 73 times for Denver. The pace of the Baylor-West Virginia game was dizzying — the official who spotted the ball had to sprint out of the way because he knew the snap was coming so fast. More snaps soften the defense. It’s hard to explain unless you’ve been on the field, but playing defense is more tiring than playing offense. At Colorado, the Oregon Ducks snapped the ball 30 times in the first quarter. Defenders were gasping for air, and were only halfway to halftime.

The NFL is understandable. Since the late 1970s the league has sought to increase scoring, by changing rules in favor of the offense — limiting allowable contact between defensive backs and receivers and liberalizing what offensive linemen can do to hold off defensive linemen. Rules and fines aim to keep the game’s most marquee players, quarterbacks, from being injured. The NFL concluded years ago that fans like more points than fewer points. (The NFL concluded before that that fans like to think at the start of a season their team has a chance to win the Super Bowl, and so the NFL has worked to make building a dynasty more difficult.)

The college explanation for offense’s current triumph over defense has more dimensions. NFL trends inevitably flow down to colleges, but colleges also have been responsible for NFL innovations.

First, some offensive history: Nearly every football offense is based on what was first called the T formation, created by the Chicago Bears in 1940. The T has a quarterback, fullback behind the quarterback, two halfbacks on either side of the fullback, and two ends outside the tackles. Several years later, the Los Angeles Rams moved the right halfback farther to the right, outside the right-side end, and the “flanker,” or “Z” receiver, was born. Teams then took one of the ends and separated him from the rest of the line, creating the “split end,” or “X” receiver. (The tight end, on the opposite side as the split end, because the “Y” receiver.)

So the basic football formation was two running backs, two ends, and either a third running back or third receiver. (A “wingback” is a running back who plays outside the tight end but just one position over, instead of several yards outside the tight end.) Running backs ran the ball, and receivers caught the ball. Then the American Football League, which figured out before the NFL that the key to drawing non-diehards to be fans was to score a lot, threw the ball lot, even to running backs. Sometimes one of the running backs was moved out of the backfield, either next to another receiver or in motion. (Flankers also went in motion to mess up the defense, whose alignment was based on where the offensive players were when they lined up.)

Two offensive changes took place in the 1970s and 1980s. Bill Walsh created what became known as the West Coast offense (once he got to San Francisco), in which all five offensive non-linemen could catch the ball, and instead of hurling the ball down the field, short passes were used to move the ball while keeping possession of the ball.

Not long after that, two coaches separately decided to throw the ball on nearly every down, more out of necessity than anything else. If you’re going to do that, why do you need more than one running back? Thus was born the run-and-shoot, an offense that uses four wide receivers and just one running back.

Other coaches passed, so to speak, on the run-and-shoot, but decided to adopt one of its attributes — spreading out the offense horizontally (from sideline to sideline), which requires the defense to spread horizontally, which opens up the field for the offense. (Including, it was discovered a few years later, for running the football.)

That may be more offensive strategy than you cared to read. A more simple explanation for the growth of scoring is better players on offense. Today’s players are unquestionably bigger and stronger, and yet faster and quicker than players of the previous generation. The old adage “offense wins games, defense wins championships” meant college coaches tended to put their best athletes on defense, under the theory that holding your opponent to fewer points is easier than scoring more points. The related adage that three things happen when you throw the football and two of them are bad either led to, or was an example of, the ground-bound offenses, and thus low-scoring games of, well, decades.

In the 1970s, the National Collegiate Athletic Association restricted football teams to, eventually, 85 scholarship players. So if you were a good high school football player and wanted to play in college, you had to consider schools other than, say, Michigan, Ohio State, Nebraska, Oklahoma, Texas, Alabama and so on. That spread out the available talent.

Football is not exactly a progressive sport, or at least it wasn’t. However, a few coaches who worked at then-unknown schools figured out that they weren’t likely to be able to recruit, say, Alabama’s players, but they could recruit players to do things Alabama and the other football powers weren’t doing. When Brigham Young University hired one of their assistants, LaVell Edwards, as head coach in 1972, Edwards started throwing the ball because the best previous season BYU had had was with a passing-oriented offense. Between 1972 and 2000, BYU had one losing season. Penn State recruited a kid from western Pennsylvania, Jim Kelly, to play linebacker. But Kelly wanted to play quarterback. Howard Schnellenberger, the coach at the University of Miami, thought Kelly would make a fine college quarterback. Kelly’s replacement at quarterback, Bernie Kosar, led the Hurricanes to a national championship.

The almighty dollar intervened elsewhere. If you are the athletic director of a college with a losing football program, a program that looks as if it will take several years to build, how can you get fans through the turnstiles? Entertain them. Mike White was hired as coach at Illinois. One of his first quarterbacks, Dave Wilson, threw for more than 600 yards in a game. People started to show up in Champaign. Fans want to win first, but if their team is going to lose, fans prefer to be entertained than bored. Similar to diehard baseball fans being entertained by a pitcher’s duel, only diehard football fans are entertained by, to quote NFL Films narrator John Facenda, a grim defensive struggle.

I haven’t studied it, but I predict that coaches with offensive backgrounds are hired more often as college head coaches than coaches with defensive backgrounds. (But that can be misleading; the three NFL coaches who ran the run-and-shoot were Jack Pardee, Jerry Glanville and Wayne Fontes. All were defensive coaches who adopted the run-and-shoot because they didn’t think defenses could stop it.)

As Easterbrook noted, college football rules haven’t kept up with the explosion in offense, which  is why college games can take longer than NFL games. (The 1984 Boston College–Miami game, featuring quarterbacks Doug Flutie and Kosar, took 4½ hours to play, and there was no overtime.) In high school and college, every first down stops the clock long enough to move the chains. (The aforementioned Dodgeville–Platteville game, with a 45-minute halftime lightning, took nearly four hours to play, with 12-minute quarters.) The clock stops on incompletions and plays out of bounds; the clock stops on out-of-bounds plays in the NFL only in the last two minutes of a half.