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+---- Thread: *Do Defenses Win Championships in the NSFL? (/showthread.php?tid=20196)
*Do Defenses Win Championships in the NSFL? - SwankyPants31 - 03-16-2020
We’ve all heard the adage repeated that in the NFL “defense wins championships”. Does the same hold true for the NSFL? I took a look through some past seasons so I could determine just that. So without further ado, lets dive right into it.
PS: This article got a little wordier than I had originally intended. For those of you lacking in patience, I have included a brief TLDR at the bottom.
The Methodology
For the sake of transparency, I want to start by explaining the methodology I’m using to determine defensive rankings. I wrestled with several issues and looked at different stats before finally deciding on what to use. At first, I considered looking at average TPE for each team’s defense, but that doesn’t take into account other important factors such as if a poor game plan was put into place for the defense, or if high TPE in certain positions are more valuable than others, as well as how to account for rotational players. In the end, I decided the simplest and most time-effective method would simply be to look at points against, since preventing the other team from scoring is the most important function of the defense. Is it a perfect metric? No, of course not. Among other issues, a team with a strong offense might be giving up more points as their opponents are continuing to put up points in garbage time. On the other hand, the opponent of a team with a poor offense may need only put up two touchdowns then run out the clock to win, causing the defense to look better than it is. To try and mitigate this, I’m including only playoff teams in my calculations. As I mentioned early though, without developing too complex of a methodology, points against was the quickest way to determine defensive rankings at a glance. So below, going back several seasons are the defensive rankings for each conference, as well as where they got in the postseason for each season.
S20
NSFC
- 275 - Quarterfinals elimination
- 280 - Semifinals elimination
- 294 - Ultimus Loss
- 317 - Quarterfinals eliminationASFC
- 260 - Ultimus Win
- 278 - Quarterfinals elimination
- 294 - Semifinals elimination
- 328 - Quarterfinals eliminationAs we can see here the Ultimus winning Copperheads had not only the best defense in regards to points against in the conference, but in the league. This would seem to point towards defense winning championships, but let's keep looking and see if we can establish a pattern.
S19
NSFC
- 266 - Semifinals elimination - 275 - Quarterfinals elimination - 278 - Quarterfinals elimination - 331 - Ultimus LossASFC
- 243 - Ultimus Win - 271 - Semifinals elimination - 288 - Quarterfinals elimination - 355 - Quarterfinals eliminationSo this one continues to follow the trend as well. Otters, with the lowest points against in the league, beat the Wraiths, who coincidentally also had the most points scored in the league.
S18
NSFC
- 239 - Ultimus Loss - 339 - Quarterfinals elimination - 346 - Semifinals elimination
- 350 - Quarterfinals eliminationASFC
- 233 - Ultimus Win - 291 - Semifinals elimination - 327 - Quarterfinals elimination - 390 - Quarterfinals eliminationThree years in a row now the team with the lowest points allowed have won the Ultimus. This time, the best defense from both conferences made the Ultimus. The two top defenses were only 6 points apart. What’s more interesting? The Otters won by that same 6 points in the Ultimus. Spooky.
S17
NSFC
- 267 - Semifinals elimination - 268 - Quarterfinals elimination - 305 - Ultimus Loss - 364 - Quarterfinals eliminationASFC
- 268 - Semifinals elimination - 275 - Ultimus Win
- 332 - Quarterfinals elimination - 343 - Quarterfinals eliminationSo here we have our first break in the pattern, with both conferences leading defenses being knocked out in the Semifinals round of the playoffs. I would like to note however, even though the Otters defense was not the top in the ASFC, they were only a touchdown away from being tied for the top.
S16
NSFC
- 257 - Semifinals elimination - 268 - Quarterfinals elimination - 306 - Ultimus Loss - 312 - Quarterfinals eliminationASFC
- 244 - Semifinals elimination - 273 - Ultimus win - 311 - Quarterfinals elimination - 381 - Quarterfinals eliminationSimilar results here as to what happened in S17. Both top defenses knocked out during the semifinals. The difference this time, however, is that the difference between the ASFC leading Otters and second place Outlaws was much more pronounced. Is my theory a sham? Have we all been lied to? Does defense not matter? At the time of writing this I began to sink into a deep despair.
S15
NSFC
- 297 - Ultimus win - 309 - Semifinals eliminationASFC
- 265 - Ultimus loss - 299 - Semifinals eliminationSo if you’re still reading, you’ve probably noticed the table here looks a little different. If you’re new here like me, you probably didn’t know that in S16 the league expanded to include two new teams as well as expand the playoffs to an additional round. Nevertheless, this was a return to what we had seen earlier, with the top defenses from each conference making it to the Ultimus. Full disclosure, the Ultimus-winning Hawks had both the top defense AND top offense in S15, but the Otters had a better offense than the SaberCats.
S14
NSFC
- 310 - Semifinals elimination - 331 - Ultimus lossASFC
- 233 - Ultimus win - 281 - Semifinals eliminationTop defense overall won again this year. Looking at the numbers here makes me wonder if the reach championship of S14 was the ASFC Semifinals, considering both teams had better defenses than either of the NSFC playoff teams.
S13
NSFC
- 349 - Ultimus loss - 377 - Semifinals eliminationASFC
- 276 - Semifinals elimination - 329 - Ultimus winSo S13 is a little weird compared to the others in that the third ranked defense ended up winning the Ultimus. On top of that, it looks like the defenses in this season were much worse than any of the defenses in the other seasons I have looked at. The 276 points allowed by the Sabercats would have been at best a second place finisher in any other season, but came in first here by a very wide margin. Perhaps its not the “best” defense of the bunch that wins championships, but only “elite” defenses?
S12
NSFC
- 297 - Ultimus loss - 382 - Semifinals eliminationASFC
- 250 - Semifinals elimination - 267 - Ultimus winI’d like to call this one back as a comparison to S17. If you’ll recall in S17, the second place defensive team won the Ultimus, however the difference between first and second place was a mere 7 points. In this case, the difference is a slightly more pronounced 17 points, however spread over a 14 game season the difference is mostly negligible.
S11
NSFC
- 336 - Ultimus loss - 417 - Semifinals eliminationASFC
- 331 - Semifinals elimination - 340 - Ultimus winHoly bad defenses, Batman! As a newcomer here, I don’t know if there was some rule or simulation change that occurred after S11, but none of these defenses even hold a candle to the top defenses of more recent years. Nevertheless, this is the last season I’m going to look at. If someone else would like to take up my research and go farther back, they’re welcome to. I think I have all I need for my judgment though. On to the data compilation!
Results
Looking at all this, I figured the best way to compile everything into something I could pass of as meaningful was to average the defensive rank of the Ultimus winning team for each season. Since half of these took place with 4 playoff teams, and the other half with only 2, I’ll be making two separate calculations and see if they agree with each other.
We’ll start with the more recent seasons, the one’s with 4 teams. If there were no correlation between good defenses and winning the Ultimus, we would expect the average conference rank to be 2.5, since an average of 1 would assume the best defense in the conference won each year and 4 would assume the worst defense won each year. So around 2.5 is average, closer to 1 means better defenses tend to win, and closer to 4 means worse defenses/teams that made the playoffs due to their high scoring offense rather than suffocating defense. All in all, the average defensive rank of the Ultimus winning team ended up being:
1.4
That gives us a pretty strong indication that regular season points allowed is a good predictor of who is going to win the Ultimus in a given season. Granted it’s based on only 5 seasons, but lets take a look at the other set of seasons now, with only 2 teams per conference. Same idea as the previous calculation, but in this case a 1.5 would be average, with closer to 1 signifying the better defense wins more and closer to 2 signifying the worse defense (read: better offense). The results for these 5 seasons are:
1.6
So for these seasons, the Ultimus tended to lean just ever so slightly more towards the worse defense of the winning conference. Given that 1.5 is average for this score though, the variance is pretty insignificant, and I imagine if I were to look further it would level out more.
Conclusion
I’ve already pretty much disclosed that the methods I used aren’t perfect, but from what I’ve seen doing this research it looks like defenses do in fact win championships. While the S11 through S15 score seems to indicate the defense rank isn’t all that important, the strength of the bias towards top defenses in the S16 through S20 seasons leads me to that conclusion.
One interesting thing I noted that I would like to point out is that after I completed computing the averages I looked back over the scores I had recorded for each season and saw something. If you go back through each season and compare the Ultimus winners and losers, you’ll see that of the two defenses in the Ultimus, the defense that allowed less points during the regular season also won the Ultimus 8 out of the 10 times I looked at. So while it can be argued that defense may not be the best metric when it comes to predicting who will eventually get to the Ultimus, it can be a very good predictor of which of the two Ultimus teams will win.
Too Long, Didn’t Read
tldr; if you want to win games in the NSFL you have to prevent your opponent from scoring points. I fully expect my discoveries here to revolutionize the draft process and bring me fame and accolades. Thank you for coming to my Ted Talk.
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WC: 1802*Do Defenses Win Championships in the NSFL? - slothfacekilla - 03-17-2020
Pay this man his money