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Defense Wins Championships? Does the 'Dominant Defense' Theory Hold in Zealots? It's a common expression, used in many sports. Fans of basketball, baseball, and football all say it with a knowing nod: "Defense Wins Championships!" The image of a dominant defense being able to
lead their team to victory by stifling and harassing their opponent
is a familiar one, and fans can list many examples to help support
this common sports saying. In the NFL, think of Ray Lewis and the Baltimore Ravens defense man-handling the New York Giants in Super Bowl XXXV to win the 2001 Lombardi Trophy and put the final punctuation point on their season of defensive intimidation. Or of Buddy Ryan's "4-6" Chicago Bears defense featuring Mike Singletary and Richard Dent, destroying the New England Patriots in Super Bowl XX to cap their historic 1985-1986 season. In that game, the Bears defense had seven sacks, two interceptions, scored a safety, and held the Patriots to 123 total yards, with only a dismal 7 rushing yards! In these and other examples, the defense was so strong and controlling that it allowed an average-to-mediocre offense to be successful -- scoring just enough points to win each game on the road to the championship. So the familiar "Defense wins Championships" adage has sprung up suggesting that defense is what ultimately leads to victory. How About Fantasy Football? But is fantasy football different? In a real NFL game, the defense wins by preventing the other team from scoring, so its impact results in a lower score for the opponent. However, in fantasy football the defensive side is really just another source of points for the owning team, the same as the offense.
Specifically, what about Zealots fantasy football leagues? How important is the defensive side of the ball in this format? Do the champions of the Zealots Super Bowls tend to rely on their defense as much or more than their offense? How typical is a Zealots championship team with defensive scoring significantly high enough that it helped carry that team to a league title? These are the questions that this article will investigate: We'll delve deep into defensive scoring using detailed data from all forty-eight leagues, and we'll compare each 2006 Zealots championship team to see just how important defensive scoring is to bringing home a Zealots championship trophy. The 2006 Zealot-league Champions First, we need to identify the 48 Zealots champions and get their scoring data by offense and defense. So using each 2006 Zealots league MFL pages, we can look at the playoff brackets to get each championship team, use the week 13 standings to get the regular-season records of each champion, and then use the scoring history report to pull weekly break-downs of the offensive and defensive scoring for the championship team's starters. This can then all be combined into a detailed spreadsheet, analyzed, and summarized as follows:
This table above lists the 2006 Champion of each Zealots league, their regular-season record and winning percentage, and their average weekly regular-season scoring total. It also divides that average weekly score down into offensive and defensive average scores. Finally, we can also add columns that take the weekly offensive and defensive point averages and list them as percentages of the overall score. For example, the Z-1 Carolina Panthers won that league's 2006 championship, had a regular-season record of 8-5 (.615), and averaged 154.74 points from their starters during the 13 regular-season weeks. That 154.74 average can be broken down into an average of 99.01 pts from the offense and 55.72 pts from the defense (a .01 difference exists due to rounding). The 99.01 average offensive points constitute 64.0% of the Panthers' total weekly score, and the 55.72 average defensive points account for the other 36.0 percent. This means that the Panthers only got a little over one-third of their scoring from their defense on the way to the playoffs and the championship. But is this 36.0% low, high, or typical? We need to compare with the other champs to see. Making the compilation for the other 47 Zealot leagues, we get the Zealots-wide Champions table above. We can now calculate the Zealots-wide average and see that there was a "typical" amount of 56.30 defensive points scored each week during the regular season for the championship teams. This accounts for 36.5% of the overall average of 154.46 points each week - almost exactly the same as the Z-1 Panthers. But also notice that there was a pretty wide range of values, too. There's evidently no "standard" way to win a Zealots championship. The overall average weekly point total for all the champs was 154.46, but it ranged from only 129.19 per week for the Z-7 Indianapolis Colts to a whopping 192.65 points for the undefeated 13-0 Z-34 San Diego Chargers. (By the way -- the '06 Z-34 Chargers are only the second team in all of Zealots history to stay undefeated on their way to the title. The 2003 Z-7 Denver Broncos were the other Zealots team to have done it. So that's only two teams out of the 120 that have won Zealots Championships since the first year in 200 - a very elite group!) Back at the table, note that in addition to the range of overall weekly scores, the average weekly defensive scores also range from 46.84 points to 65.78 points, and the average weekly defensive scoring percentage ranges from 31.1% to 41.4%. But notice that these don't go together - the low and high defensive point averages matched the teams for the extremes of the total point averages, but that did not correspond to the average defensive percentages: The Z-7 Colts averaged 46.84 defensive points, but it accounted for 36.3% of their scoring, and the steam-rolling Z-34 Chargers had the high defensive scoring average of 65.78 points per week, but that was only 34.1% of their total score. Apparently, there's something more going on here than just the "high weekly defensive points = high weekly defensive percentage" relationship that might be expected. Maybe we can gather some additional scoring data to get a better understanding of how important defensive scoring and defensive scoring percentages are, and to hopefully find some general rules. The Best Record is Not a Guarantee But first, one more interesting thing about our 2006 Zealot Champions: While the champions had a very respectable average regular-season winning percentage of .686, this doesn't tell the whole story.
To me, that's very surprising. OK, so what's next? Well, as we said -- maybe we can get a better understanding of how important defensive scoring was to the champions by looking at some more data. How about comparing our champions to the other extreme? Let's wade back into each league's MFL site and pull data for the team with the worst record in 2006. Then we might learn something when we compare their numbers to the Champions. For example, if we see that the worst teams only averaged a defensive scoring percentage of 20% -30%, then we can conclude that the 31% - 41% that the champions averaged means that the they really did rely more on their defense, and that in Zealots, defense does "win championships," or at least help. The Teams with the Worst Records Choosing the team in each league with the worst regular-season record (or the one with the lowest point totals if multiple teams tied for worst), we get this table:
Ugggh: The overall wining percentage average for the worst Zealot teams was a dismal 0.191. We also see that the losing teams only averaged a weekly total of 124.29 points, made up of an average of 75.76 offensive points and 48.54 defensive points (again, a slight difference due to rounding). The teams that lost the most games averaged less total, offensive, and defensive points than the championship teams, as you might expect, so this makes sense. After all, higher point totals are what win games and lead to championships. But while it's true that the worst teams tended to score less, there's still a wide range: The "best of the worst" Z-25 Jacksonville Jaguars went 5-8 and averaged 141.44 points per week. That's even higher than the lowest championship team's average of 129.19 weekly points (the Z-7 Colts). At the other extreme, the woeful 0-13 Z-5 Tampa Bay Buccaneers didn't even break an average of 100 points a game, gathering a meager 95.30 points each week during their winless regular season. So we see a wide range in scoring values for the Champions and a lower, but also wide, range in values for the worst teams, so it's still hard to relate defensive percentage of the overall score to winning or losing. But maybe if we look at it graphically, we can see a clearer story. Seeing the Big Picture The first stab is to make a plot of the overall scoring average of both the champions and the worst-record teams, and compare it to each team's winning percentage:
Notice the linear trend-line sloping upwards and to the right, as you might expect? Higher average weekly points on the bottom scale directly correlates to higher winning percentages on the left vertical scale. Finally, see the "R2=0.81" at the bottom right of the chart? This is a measure of how well the data points "fit" the trend-line. A perfect fit, with every point directly on the line would give an R2 value of 1.00, saying that 100% of the change in y (winning percentage) can be attributed to the change in x (average scoring). The R2 value of 0.81 is an extremely good fit, showing that most of the data is grouped near to the trend-line and the relationship between winning percentage and average weekly scoring is a very close one. So what about just the offense scoring? Is there also a close relationship between just the offensive score and how many games a team wins? Let's see:
Yes, even with just offensive scoring, the
relationship is still clear as day. The data points are a little
more scattered than they were for total scoring, but the R2 value of
0.75 shows that there is still a very good fit between offensive
scoring and winning percentage. So the last question to answer is the ones that got us here in the first place: Do the champions also tend have a higher defensive percentage of their overall score? Will this give us the indication that "Defense wins Championships" can hold in Zealots? The Answer Revealed Let's plot the comparison of defensive scoring percentage vs. winning percentage. Then we can see if the positive trend we've seen so far still holds, showing that the championship teams also have a higher reliance on defensive scoring percentage.
Whoa!!! Here the line is totally the opposite of what the other graphs were!!! If there wasn't any relationship between defensive scoring percentages and winning percentages, we'd either see the points evenly scattered all over the chart and the R2 value would be nearly 0.00. Then we could conclude that the adage "Defense wins Championships" is not true in Zealots. But instead we still see a trend-line, yet it's not sloping up as the other lines were -- it's sloping down as it moves to the right. There's a lot more scattering of the data, and our R2 value is down to only 0.24, but there is still some correlation between average defensive scoring percentage and winning results, but the downward slope means it's a negative one! In other words, not only is the phrase, "Defense wins Champions" generally false in Zealots, but also that the exact opposite is usually true: The losing teams tend to rely more on their defense as a percentage of their total score! Not always -- notice that there were three losing teams with defensive scoring percentages below 35% and three championship teams with defensive scoring percentages above 40% (although they also had records of 7-6 or 6-7). But the trend happens often enough that a rough linear relationship can be seen. And this trend clearly relates to the offensive side of the ball too - the plot of the reliance on Offensive scoring as an overall percentage of the total score is the mirror-image of the defensive one:
Same result as the last chart just flipped about the 50% scoring percentage line. But now that trend-line shows the positive relationship between offensive scoring percentage and winning percentage. Does Defense Still Matter? So what can we take out this when we put it all together? Well, the general rule is that in Zealots, defense doesn't win championships - total points do, and the champions tend to have a greater reliance on offensive points to make up their overall score. But does that mean to win it all in Zealots we should generally all try to be the next "greatest show on turf?" Should we go so far as to completely ignore the defensive players all-together? That the defense doesn't really matter at all? Definitely, emphatically, absolutely: NO!!! Look again at that third graph: The data clearly shows that champions tended to score more points on defense. They didn't get to be league trophy holders by having ignored the defensive part of their rosters. The champs may be relying more on their offense overall, but they're also still getting more points on defense too - and it all matters. To give yourself the best chance to win it all in Zealots, you generally need to have a dominant offense as part of a team that gives higher scoring at every position, and you ignore the defensive side at your own risk. A Few Words About the Trees Also, remember that the line seen in the third graph is the resulting trend from combining 13 weeks of data for 2 teams in each of 48 leagues - 1,248 scoring results during a season. This is a mile-high view of the forest, not a description of individual trees, and certainly NOT a prediction of what can happen in individual games. There is still a wide range of variation in the season results from team to team, and even more when specific game-by-game results are looked at. There are certainly many instances where a crucial game was won or lost because a team's offense and/or defense didn't perform as expected. This is easy to tell just by looking again at the fact that only 22 of the teams with the best record won the championship - if it wasn't possible for single-game swings in scoring to lead to critical wins (or losses), this number would be much higher. So in spite of the overall trend, there are definitely games during the season where a defense scored more than "expected" and helped give a team a vital win on the road to the championships. Defense still counts, and sometimes it can count a lot. Conclusion But as a Zealots-wide, season-long, general rule, the data clearly suggests that a higher reliance on defensive scoring for a greater percentage of a team's overall score corresponds to both a lower winning percentage and a lower likelihood of winning championships. So the bottom line is still a simple one: To win a championship in Zealots, your team needs to score, and the more the better. Being able to rely on a high-powered offense is the most important component, but getting higher points on defense helps too. Defense alone may not win championships in Zealots, but it's still an important piece of a winning combination. If you have any comments or questions on this article, or if you would like a copy of the complete 2006 Scoring Record spreadsheet used for this article in MS Excel, please feel free to contact the writing staff at writingstaff@zealotsfield.com. |
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So
can a fantasy team still manage to have a "dominant defense"? One
that scores consistently high enough that it can carry a team to the
championship, even if the offense is mediocre?
Notice
the Best record column in the table ("Best Rec")? A "Yes" in this
column indicates that the team that won the league championship also
had (or tied for) the best regular-season record. Amazingly, only 22
of the 48 champions did finish the regular Zealots season with the
best winning record. That means that not only is the best
regular-season record no lock on the title, but also that Zealot
teams were more likely to win a championship in 2006 if they made it
to the playoffs without having the best record! There were even four
Z-teams who won the championship with "losing" regular-season
records of 6-7!
