Bear Bryant is credited with the quote: “Offense sells tickets, but defense wins championships.” The latter half of the adage has been debunked by many sports statisticians. In this post, I’ve visualized the data for all 47 Super Bowl winners. The pie graph in the bottom left of the scatter plot shows that slightly more teams have had higher ranked offenses than defenses, but it’s almost a coin flip.

Interestingly, the median rank (as a decimal representing rank/number of teams in the league that year) is slightly better for defense (0.10) than for offense (0.15). In the current league, with 32 teams, that would mean a typical rank of about 3rd in defense and 5th in offense. The averages are also slightly skewed toward a better defense (0.19) than offense (0.20). What this means is that, while slightly more teams have a better offensive rank, those teams tend to have only a slightly worse defensive rank. For the teams that have a better defensive rank, they often have notably worse offensive ranks. If we look at the median rank differentials, the champions with better defenses have a defense rank that is 0.2 higher than their offense rank. On the opposite end, teams with stronger offenses have an offensive rank that is only 0.15 higher than their defensive rank. So the lesson here is that you are more likely to win with a bad offense and a good defense than vice versa. Of course, you’re most likely to win if both your defense and offense are good…

Data source: http://www.pro-football-reference.com/super-bowl/