There’s a symmetrical bit of woozy folk wisdom often credited, probably apocryphally, to 1960s Green Bay Packers football coach Vince Lombardi that goes either:

The best offense is a good defense

or

The best defense is a good offense

Things that human beings find interesting, such as football, tend to be fairly 50-50 phenomena where either, or both, might be true.

But we can also see trends over time. For example, American football used to be a much more maladroit game. For example, a college coach said he hated the forward pass because three things can happen and two of them are bad.

So it made sense to concentrate on defense and opportunistically wait for the other team’s offense to misfire. You still see this with top high school football programs. They tend to win games, say, 42-7 with only 9 first downs. How? An interception return for a touchdown, a punt return for a touchdown, a fumble recovery on the other team’s 15 yard line, and the like.

But in the NFL these days, even playing in January in Seattle in the rain, you can’t just nurse a lead of less than two touchdowns as Green Bay tried to do today.

Things have changed so much that when Seattle’s Marshawn Lynch scored the go-ahead touchdown with 1:25 left in the 4th quarter, he walked in backwards.

I suspect he was looking back to see if anybody wanted him to kneel down on the 1 yard line to deny Green Bay time to get the ball back and score (which they did, but Green Bay still lost in overtime 28-22).

This notion that in the 21st Century the best defense is a good offense has numerous applications, such as in politics and social discourse: be offensive and take offense is a winning strategy these days.