Cliche Busting: Offense Wins Games, Defense Wins Championships

Cliche Busting: Offense Wins Games, Defense Wins Championships

If you’ve watched football for any length of time, you’ve probably heard somebody utter the phrase: “Offense wins games, defense wins championships”. The championship side of that was certainly evident in the Seahawks dismantling of the high-powered Denver offense, a snooze-fest for most NFL fans, that will remain my favorite Superbowl until the Chiefs win it in my lifetime. It was, unfortunately, true again, last year, when that same Broncos team rode a putrid offense and a fearsome defense to victory against the hapless Carolina Panthers. So certainly defense wins championships, but aren’t championships just bigger games? Shouldn’t defense or offense make the same impact whether it’s regular season or the playoffs? This got me curious so I decided to look into it.

 “You don’t have to win it. Just don‘t lose it.”

-Ray Lewis to Elvis Grbac

I began by looking at points scored and points allowed. This is how you truly define an offense or a defense. Yards are a highly subjective stat. For example, a team with a good defense and special teams will, generally, give their offense better field position. A TD drive starting at the 20 on either side of the field is still ultimately worth six points, but shows up differently in the stat sheet yard-wise. Conversely, a bad defense can drive up the yard total for a mediocre offense by shear number of opportunities. For 2012-2015 I took an average of the offensive and defensive ranks of teams ending the year with 11 wins or more. For 2016, I looked at teams with five wins or more. Here are the results:

There’s a lot of ways you can spin that data. You could say that three of the last four years, the best teams have been better on defense than offense. However, you could also note, that between 2012 and 2015, offenses for winning teams ranked higher, twice as much as the defenses did. Since 2016, data is still incomplete so it’s not as conclusive. This means that the value of offenses and defenses were essentially the same.

To see if it would clarify things, I went back through the same data and counted the number of teams with 11 wins, or more, who had defenses or offenses ranked outside the top 10. The idea was that, if more teams won with less than elite defenses, then the defense was not as important. And, if more teams won without top 10 offenses, then offenses would have to be considered less important.

Unfortunately, the totals come out really close. From 2012 to 2016, 21 of the best teams didn’t have a top 10 defense. In that same time frame, 23 of the best teams didn’t have a top 10 offense. What does that tell us? Basically, the same thing that the rest of the data did: offense and defense are about equally important… when it comes to winning games in the regular season.

Super  Bowl winners over the last four years have averaged a 10.25 rank on offense vs a 6.25 rank on defense. So, that part of the saying holds up, but where does that leave us as a whole? Basically, offense wins games in the regular season, defense wins games AND championships. Moral of the story: defense is more important than offense.

With all the controversy surrounding Foles and Smith, it’s important to remember, Alex Smith may not do as much for the offense, but he does a lot more for the defense than Foles has thus far in his career. It’s why he’s been one of the winningest QBs in the NFL since he arrived in Kansas City. When I’m tempted not to appreciate what Kansas City has in #11, I’ll turn my mind back to Ray Lewis’ words. “You don’t have to win it. Just don’t lose it.” Those words are especially appropriate because they remind me of Lewis’ last Super Bowl win: a nail-biter against a young QB who ultimately found himself out-matched by a tough defense, leaving 49er fans to always wonder, what if coach Harbaugh had stuck with Alex Smith?

Random Note: Get ready to say, “Who is that guy?” LB Terrence Smith is being elevated to the 53 man roster. You won’t see him start on defense, but I’m confident his number will show up a good deal on Special Teams.

And that’s my Sizzling Take.