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The Arizona Cardinals reached a dubious achievement Thursday night, at least in this era of NFL offense. Their 12-6 victory over the St. Louis Rams made them the first team this season to win a game without scoring a touchdown.

The reasons were not mysterious. Both teams started their backup quarterbacks against top-end defenses, and the Cardinals finished with third-stringer Ryan Lindley at the helm after Drew Stanton's knee injury. But the low score prompted an early-morning question: How could we get this type of game after yet another shift of officiating toward offense?

As you recall, the league's points of emphasis for officials this season included two penalties -- defensive holding and illegal contact -- that figured to further limit defenders from stopping the passing game. The theory didn't overtly hold Thursday night; the teams combined for 342 passing yards and neither penalty was among the 14 accepted by Walt Coleman's crew. (Of course, there is no way to measure whether defenders have backed off as a result of earlier penalty calls, as San Diego Chargers quarterback Philip Rivers suggested they might.)

Regardless, with three weeks remaining in the season, we can get pretty close to answering whether the officiating shift made an impact on the game, as initially feared.

The chart shows that officials have far surpassed the total number of defensive holding and illegal contact penalties they called for the entire 2013 season. The rest of the numbers provide an equal comparison to the first 14 weeks of 2013, excluding Thursday night's game, to ensure that each sample covers the same total of 416 games.

As you can see, offensive scoring has remained static while yardage totals have increased slightly.

The more notable impact has come in efficiency. Overall completion percentage is up 1.7 points, while the touchdown-interception ratio has gone from 1.7 to 1.88. Total quarterback rating, meanwhile, has taken a significant jump from 52.6 in 2013 to 57.3 through Week 14 of this season.

Have quarterbacks become more effective in 2014, or has it been easier for them to operate efficiently under the points of emphasis? There is a tendency to connect those trends at some level, but it's worth noting that even without the new approach, QBR rose from 49.8 after 14 weeks in 2010 to 55.4 through the same time period of 2012. At the very least, it didn't hurt.

Note: As always, the bar graph at the top of this post documents the per-game frequency of all penalty calls this season by crew. Carl Cheffers' crew continues to be the most active at 19.4 penalties per game, with Brad Allen (13.7) and Clete Blakeman (13.4) continuing to hold up the other end of the bracket.