Does Defense Really Win Championships?
By Tobias J. Moskowitz and L. Jon Wertheim
It’s at this point in the NFL postseason when every NFL analyst, pundit, and blogger will inevitably proclaim “defense wins championships.” With the NFL conference championships upon us this weekend, this phrase will be uttered more times than “yo” in a typical Jersey Shore episode. And why not?
Last weekend we saw two of the NFL’s top offenses — Green Bay and New Orleans — lose to better defenses. Moreover, as
Chris Berman himself pointed out on ESPN’s
Sunday NFL Countdown, 38 (out of 45) Super Bowls have been won by a top 10 defense and 22 have been won by a top three defense. The sentiment has hardened from cliché into an article of sports law. But is it actually true? Does defense really win championships?
In a word: no.
We found that when it comes to winning a title, or winning in sports in general for that matter, offense and defense carry nearly identical weight. For example, here’s what Berman didn’t tell you: the number of Super Bowl champs with a top 10 offense? Thirty-eight. And a top 3 offense? Twenty. In other words, offense wins championships, too.
We further found that among the 45 NFL Super Bowls, the better defensive team — measured by points allowed that season— has won 29 times. The better offensive team won 25 times. (Note that adds up to 53, which means that some teams are the better offensive
and defensive team in the Super Bowl. Nineteen Super Bowls have featured a team superior on both sides of the ball. Those teams have won 14 of those games.) It’s a slight edge for defense, but it’s a pretty close call and not different from random chance. The favorite statistic of the “defense wins championships” proponents is that the top-ranked defense during the regular season has won 15 Super Bowls, whereas the top-ranked offense has won only 8. Although this would seem to confer an advantage to defense, these two numbers are not statistically different. And, remember, since the top-three defenses have won no more than the top-three offensive teams, it also means that offensive teams ranked 2 and 3 have won more Super Bowls than the second- and third-best defensive teams, though again, these differences are not statistically significant.
But we’re only talking about 45 games, so let’s broaden the sample size.
There have been 427 NFL playoff games over the last 45 seasons. The better defensive teams have won 58 percent of them. The better offensive teams have won 62 percent of the time. (Again, the winning team is sometimes better both offensively and defensively, which explains why the total exceeds 100 percent.) That’s a slight edge to the offense, but again, pretty even.
In almost 10,000 regular season games, the better defensive team has won 66.5 percent of the time compared with 67.4 percent of the time for the better offensive team. That’s a slight nod to the offense but a negligible difference.
But maybe the phrase “defense wins championships” is supposed to mean is that defense is somehow more necessary than offense. Maybe a team can prevail with a middling offense, but not with a middling defense. As it turns out, that doesn’t hold up, either. Three times the Super Bowl champion ranked in the bottom half of the league in defense; only twice did it rank in the bottom half in offense. The lowest-ranked defensive team to win a Super Bowl was the 2006 Indianapolis Colts, rated nineteenth that year. (They offset that by ranking third in offense.) The lowest-ranked offensive team to win the Lombardi Trophy? The 2000 Baltimore Ravens, ranked nineteenth in offense but first in defense.
What about when a great offense faces a great defense? Twenty-seven Super Bowls have pitted a top 5 offense against a top 5 defense. The best offensive team won 13, and the best defensive team won 14. Another stalemate.
Again, its wrong. Its statistically EVEN. Its just a bunch of crap regurgitated by the media and people have bought into it.
JMH?O
