Written by Kevin Seifert at ESPN.com
So you want to win a Super Bowl?
Here’s a simple, one-step guide: Get yourself a Hall of Fame quarterback, sit back and wait.
But don’t forget, defenses win championships.
Except, of course, when they don’t.
And so goes any attempt to find the ultimate truth in the NFL. As the league transitions to the offseason, and teams focus on improving rosters for 2016, it’s hard to deny that the straightest line to a championship is riding an elite-level quarterback. But it’s also impossible to ignore that the past three seasons have rendered that simple plan well short of foolproof.
The NFL’s top defense has advanced to the Super Bowl in each of those years, and in two of them it slayed an All-Pro caliber quarterback and carried its team to a championship. The Denver Broncos forced Carolina Panthers quarterback Cam Newton into his worst performance of the season to win Super Bowl 50, and the Seattle Seahawks throttled a still-elite Peyton Manning and the Broncos in Super Bowl XLVIII.
One of the biggest mistakes in NFL analysis is projecting the most recent result into future trends. No, we are not necessarily entering an era when defense is more important than quarterback play. But there is reason for hope among teams who don’t have a top-10 quarterback and know how hard it is to find one.
Let’s take a closer look at what has happened in the NFL’s so-called passing era.
Passing production and efficiency continued to rise in 2015. As the chart shows, NFL teams have never thrown for more yards per game, tossed more touchdowns, completed passes at a higher rate and thrown interceptions at a lower rate than they did this season. There was a record number of quarterbacks with at least 30 touchdowns passes, and quarterbacks threw at least three touchdowns in a game more times than in any other season in NFL history.
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