{"id":11013,"date":"2018-01-13T01:56:48","date_gmt":"2018-01-13T01:56:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/?p=11013"},"modified":"2018-01-14T01:59:55","modified_gmt":"2018-01-14T01:59:55","slug":"does-defense-actually-win-championships","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/does-defense-actually-win-championships\/","title":{"rendered":"Does defense actually win championships?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Mark Otten<\/a>, California State University, Northridge<\/a><\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

Legendary football coach Paul \u201cBear\u201d Bryant famously said, \u201cOffense sells tickets. Defense wins championships.\u201d<\/p>\n

Since Bryant\u2019s retirement in 1982, his adage has been perpetuated widely in sports media<\/a>, applied to other sports<\/a> and debated vehemently<\/a>. <\/p>\n

The thinking goes that while offense may be flashy and exciting, solid defensive play \u2013 less noticeable, but more steady and predictable \u2013 forms the foundation of successful teams. <\/p>\n

So is there any truth to the adage?<\/p>\n

In my sport psychology lab<\/a> at California State University, Northridge, graduate student Travis Miller<\/a> and I ran our own statistical analyses<\/a> to see if defense does, in fact, win championships. <\/p>\n

Reaffirmation \u2013 with a twist<\/h2>\n

In our study, we looked at football and basketball, taking different approaches for each sport. For football, we limited our sample size to teams that had made the NFL playoffs during the Super Bowl era, which gave us 515 playoff teams to analyze.<\/p>\n

To represent a team\u2019s offensive ability, we used regular season yards gained per game; for defensive ability, we used the statistic of yards allowed per game. If defense wins championships, the teams that tend to allow the fewest yards over the course of a season should have the most playoff success.<\/p>\n

What did the numbers say? After running some regression analyses, we found that defense, indeed, does win championships. The fewer regular season yards a team allowed in the regular season, the more playoff wins they tended to have.<\/p>\n

So there you have it: Coach Bryant is a genius, and we should all head to Las Vegas to bet on the teams with the best defenses.<\/p>\n

But as ESPN\u2019s Lee Corso<\/a> would say \u2013 not so fast, my friend. <\/p>\n

The same analysis revealed that yards gained offensively during the season correlated similarly \u2013 nearly identically, in fact \u2013 with subsequent playoff success. It turns out we should probably amend the adage to say: \u201cReally good defense wins championships. And really good offense also wins championships.\u201d <\/p>\n

This doesn\u2019t quite have the same ring to it, but it seems to be more reflective of the data.<\/p>\n

In a similar analysis of 632 NBA playoff teams since 1971, we arrived at similar findings. Substituting the field goal percentage of teams\u2019 opponents for the yards gained by teams\u2019 opponents, we saw that regular season defense correlated with basketball playoff success. But regular season offense did, too \u2013 again, at a similar rate.<\/p>\n

Playoff pressure doesn\u2019t discriminate<\/h2>\n

If you were to look at previous sport psychology research, you might have reason to believe that a good defense was more important than offense when it came to winning a championship. <\/p>\n

Most studies of why athletes might either \u201cchoke\u201d or be \u201cclutch\u201d under pressure had tested fine motor skills such as field goal kicking in football<\/a> and free throw shooting in basketball<\/a>. On the other hand, defensive skills typically require more footwork and continuous movement, and \u2013 in the case of a defensive lineman or a linebacker in football \u2013 physical strength. <\/p>\n

For this reason, it was generally assumed that defensive play might be more stable, and less susceptible to pressure when seasons are on the line. If this were true, then the play of good defensive teams would remain steady during the playoffs, while good offensive teams would be more vulnerable to pressure-packed situations. <\/p>\n

So what might explain why our findings suggest otherwise?<\/p>\n

It may be that defensive players feel the pressure just as much as offensive players do, with their performance prone to the same fluctuations. After all, most burly defensive linemen aren\u2019t just blindly crashing into the line; rather, they\u2019re moving with the precision of a ballet dancer<\/a>. At the very least, when it comes to dealing with pressure, it probably doesn\u2019t matter if you\u2019re a cornerback or a quarterback; sport psychology research has shown<\/a> that athletes who feel confident and in control are more likely to give a clutch performance.<\/p>\n

\n \"\"<\/a>
\n When it\u2019s all on the line, which side of the ball you\u2019re on might matter less than your ability to feel in control.<\/span>
\n AP Photo\/Stephen B. Morton<\/a><\/span>
\n <\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Incidentally, our NBA data suggested that three-point shooting may be the basketball skill most vulnerable to pressure \u2013 more than defensive skills. For basketball, then, a new hypothesis might be: \u201cClutch three-point shooting wins championships.\u201d In a previous study on baseball<\/a>, we found that hitting ability may fluctuate more in the postseason than pitching ability. This implied that \u201cclutch hitting wins championships.\u201d<\/p>\n

Maybe we just haven\u2019t looked at football under the microscope carefully enough, and it\u2019s worth analyzing whether specific positions or actions \u2013 throwing a football, protecting the pocket, covering a wide receiver \u2013 are more vulnerable to pressure. Maybe \u201coffensive line play wins championships,\u201d or \u201cquarterbacking wins championships.\u201d <\/p>\n

\"TheBut for now, I\u2019ll make the bold prediction that the best defensive team will win Super Bowl 52 \u2013 that, or the one that\u2019s best at offense.<\/p>\n

Mark Otten<\/a>, Associate Professor of Psychology, California State University, Northridge<\/a><\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

This article was originally published on The Conversation<\/a>. Read the original article<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Mark Otten, California State University, Northridge Legendary football coach Paul \u201cBear\u201d Bryant famously said, \u201cOffense sells tickets. Defense wins championships.\u201d Since Bryant\u2019s retirement in 1982, his adage has been perpetuated widely in sports media, applied to other sports and debated vehemently. The thinking goes that while offense may be flashy and exciting, solid defensive play […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":44,"featured_media":11014,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[293],"tags":[303,2592,305,3377,228,203,463],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11013"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/44"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11013"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11013\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11015,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11013\/revisions\/11015"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/11014"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11013"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11013"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11013"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}