| Chris Hu said: You can win a superbowl with a lousy offense if you have a great defense Tampa Bay in 2002 would be the best example they actually pretty much shut down the #1 offense in the superbowl. Plus you can win a superbowl with a great defenese and without a ballanced offense the 85 Bears would probably be the best example of that they had a great rushing offense but where near the bottom of the leauge when it came to passing yards. |
Well sure, you can. We've had 50 Super Bowl winners now who have won during a myriad of different rulesets encouraging different playstyles; you're bound to find some teams that have won with virtually nothing but defense (particularly the further back you go, when the rules weren't as pass friendly as they are today). But that's not the question. The question is "does defense win championships?" Or, in simpler terms, is defense the most important aspect of a potential championship team?
In today's NFL, with today's ruleset favoring offenses (particularly passing) much more than, say, your Bears of 30 years ago, there seems to be relatively little evidence for it. Sure, you can reference examples of teams like Tampa Bay with supposed "lousy" offenses (personally I think the 2000 Ravens are a much better example of that, considering the 2002 Bucs averaged over 35 points a game in their playoff run), but you're not going to consistently find many teams in the past 15 or so years who have won by heavily relying on their defense in every on of their playoff games. The same holds true for offense: I can reference teams like the 2009 Saints, who won with basically nothing but offense, or the 2011 Patriots, who made the Super Bowl with the second worst defense in the league that year. Those are outliars, however, and you won't find many examples of teams relying almost exclusively on one side of the ball. That's because the NFL rewards not just being good at one side of the ball, but being able to cover for your flaws. If you look at every recent Super Bowl winner, you will find that the one thing in common isn't a great defense, or a great offense, but rather that they compensated for where they were weakest and made it either a non issue or less of a problem. Last year's Broncos took the pressure off Manning with a strong running game and a defense that created over. The 2014 Patriots got around a lack of a running game with quick passes and a hurry up offense that kept teams from getting to Brady despite knowing that running wasn't a threat. The 2013 Seahawks made up for a rookie quarterback with Marshawn Lynch and by drugging Peyton Manning before the Super Bowl. So on and so forth.
The team that wins this year's Super Bowl might be the best defense, or the best offense, or neither. But it will almost assuredly be the team that compensates for its weakest area the best (and having a weak point that's relatively difficult to exploit helps as well).
