Is the era of quarterback-driven success in the NFL over?

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0:58Robert Mays: Welcome to the athletic football show. I'm Robert Mays. We're asking a pretty big question on today's athletic football show. This is inspired by a bunch of different things. I think there were some moments during last season that had me ruminating on this. The fact that Sam Darnold won the Super Bowl, I think really kind of pushes it to a different place. Defenses being as good as they've been over the last couple of years. A guy like Mike McDonald kind of rising to the level of prominence he now has, feeling like he's ushering in a slightly different version of how the NFL feels. We wanted to ask the question today of, is the offense and quarterback-centric and dominant era of the NFL over?

1:39Robert Mays: Two of the last three teams that won the Super Bowl finished outside the top 10 in EPA per play on offense. Two of the last three. It hadn't happened since 2015. We have a different sort of feel to the teams that are winning championships now than it felt like for most of recent NFL history. What can we learn from those teams? Is this the model moving forward? And are we really shutting the door on the previous era of what the league felt like and what types of teams were capable of winning the Super Bowl? That's the question we asked today. That's what we dug into today with me, Dave Hellman, and Derek Klassen.

2:16Robert Mays: Let's get to that conversation right now.

2:28Robert Mays: I'd say there's been four or five moments that pushed me to want to have the conversation that we're going to have today. One of them sticks with me. It was me and you sitting at the same, I think Derek was here too, actually, when we were figuring out the teams we were chopping from the table in the back half of the season going into the second half of last year. and we were just holding on for dear life to the teams led by the MVP level quarterbacks. Looking for a reason to still believe in them? We were looking for a reason to just hang on because I think so much of the last 10, 15 years of the NFL has taught us that those guys are going to be around at the end.

3:03Robert Mays: Like that is what the NFL feels like in a given season. And I think in a lot of ways, the league felt different last year. It felt different during the season, and then it felt different when we got to the end of the season. And I think if we wanted to expand it a little bit beyond last year, I think the last few years of the NFL have felt a little bit different. The last two Super Bowl-winning quarterbacks were Jalen Hurts and Sam Darnold, which, you know, guys that we've probably underrated at times but are still not the types of quarterbacks we're used to winning Super Bowls, the Patrick Mahomes, the Tom Brady's.

3:34Robert Mays: And then the last three seasons, I think you can make an argument that the Super Bowl has been won by defense first teams, even one that had Patrick Mahomes at quarterback. Two times in the last three years, Derek, a team with an offense outside of the top 10 in EPA per play has won the Super Bowl twice in the last three years. Before that, it hadn't happened since 2015. So the conversation I wanted to have today, are we really in a new era of the NFL? what the last three years have felt like the teams that have won the Super Bowl how they've been constructed the identity you would ascribe to them are we moving out of a period where the league is quarterback and offense driven and dominant and heading into a new era where we have to question those things maybe a little bit more than we would have five or ten years ago

4:24Derrik Klassen: that's what I want to dig into today I think the answer is unequivocally yes and I will I will own a mea culpa where I had a big role in being unwilling to dismiss some of those teams that employ an MVP level quarterback a team that is built in essence around its quarterback I think you have to let that go at least in the in the era we're currently in the way things are trending you have to let that go as being the primary driving force for team success but we'll get into this, I kind of came back around on it where yes, other things matter just as much, if not more than the quarterback. You still need a very, very high level of quarterback play at some point along the line to win a championship.

5:15Derrik Klassen: And so I did this fun journey while I was preparing for this show where the numbers scream at you that yes, you can deemphasize quarterback to a certain degree, but I'm only willing to go so far. I think that's ultimately where I came down.

5:33Dave Helman: I think kind of where I came down on this is like, you still need an elite side of the ball and you need your team to come out in like a certain net positive in EPA, DVO, whatever you want it to be, to get there. And how you get there, I think matters to me a little bit less. I think it's maybe a little bit easier to do with defense now than it had in previous years because of the way the game has shifted and certain things like that. And what I will say, the part of this I think that is maybe actionable is I still think that like you want to have one of the elite quarterbacks, right? Like I would always rather build around a Josh Allen, Lamar Jackson, Justin Herbert, whoever it's going to be, then have to live into the wilderness and have to be signing a Sam Darnold off the scrap heap, whatever it's going to be.

6:16Dave Helman: But I do think previous teams that were living in what you always say, Robert, of like winning in the NFL is winning with Ryan Tannehill. previous versions of that were trying to do it by crafting elite offenses that could contend with the elite quarterbacks and I think the problem that those teams ran into is let's say a Patrick Mahomes offense is top five and a Ryan Tannehill offense is top five at the end of the day the Patrick Mahomes one is going to be better like when it comes to it's less fragile for sure yes it's it's less fragile exactly like it's they are they're less immune to breaking down in those high-pressure scenarios.

6:52Dave Helman: But now what we've seen over the last two years specifically is that if you are trying to win with the Ryan Tannehill, you still need to get the offense to a certain level. Obviously, the Eagles did this with all their skill players in offensive line. The Seahawks were able to do this with their scheme, having JSN be the way that he played, and the quarterback has to play at a certain level. But the investment of resources is really on the defense and making sure the defense is kicking enough ass rather than trying to go like blow for blow having these 30 to 32 games with the other elite quarterbacks.

7:20Dave Helman: I think that to me is kind of where I took away from this.

7:23Robert Mays: So before we try to figure out whether we're entering a new era or an era has closed, a door has shut, let's try to do our best here to establish what the previous era was and where we're drawing some of these lines. We've been kicking this around for like the last few days in terms of how we're going to try to separate and delineate this stuff. Where did you land on like the time period that we're talking about with the era that we may be moving out of and what you think are the most important signifying markers of it?

7:52Derrik Klassen: I think there's a few reasons to zero in on a certain time period. For starters, the very, very good, useful, advanced stats that make our jobs so easy only started to become reliable and commonplace around 2016. Like, that's when the next-gen database goes back to. So you've got 2016. You've got right around the time Shanahan's offense is coming into vogue. He is the hot name. Like, he was Ben Johnson a decade ago. He takes the Niners job. Thank you. I appreciate that. Hey, for the record, Shanahan hasn't won a Super Bowl yet. I'm just saying. F*** off. So you get Shanahan going to San Francisco in 17.

8:36Robert Mays: Sean McVay, he was 17 season. Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. 17 season.

8:42Derrik Klassen: McVay starts in L.A. in the 17th season. Mahomes gets drafted. Mahomes starts playing in 2018. And then we're off to the races. So it doesn't all line up perfectly, but somewhere around 2016 and definitely by 2018. I think you're firmly in this era that we're trying to describe.

9:00Robert Mays: That's probably where I would start it as well for a few different reasons. I mean, again, I just said it. the Chiefs were the first team in 2023 to win the Super Bowl after finishing outside the top 10 in EPA per play on offense since the Broncos did it in 2015. And then even if you go back a couple years before that, if you look at the Final Four, I looked at every team that finished in the Final Four since 2011 when the new CBA started and where they ranked on offense or defense in EPA per play. In 2012, 2013, 2014, and 2015, we have teams that made the final four that were outside the top 10 in EPA per play on offense.

9:37Robert Mays: And that may not seem crazy, but then when you actually look at it, from 2016 through 2022, only two teams made the final four while finishing outside the top 10 in EPA per play on offense. Two. That's a seven-year span. So that's 28 teams. Only two teams made the final four, finishing out of the side of the top 10 offense, the 2017 Jags and the 2021 Bengals. From 2012 to 2015, it happened every single year. And so I do think that that, it might've been a short lived in terms of it being the defining aspect of the league. But if we wanted to just say 2012 through 2014, 2015 is the Legion of Boom defense era, like a little spike of that.

10:22Robert Mays: I think that in 2016, for all the reasons that Dave said, we do start to move in a slightly different direction. And I think the Falcons in 2016 loom large in this way for a couple different reasons. One, you have a character that has come to like really define this offensive era in the NFL, have his first big moment before he becomes a head coach in Kyle Shanahan. But also for me personally, it kind of crystallizes this idea of a team that can be elite, elite, elite on offense and objectively bad on defense and be right there on the doorstep of the Super Bowl. And then so you combine that with 2017 year where you get McVeigh Shanahan, you get Mahomes drafted.

11:02Robert Mays: So it really does, Derek, feel like in 2016, we kind of move into the beginnings of whatever the previous seven years felt like before 2023.

11:12Dave Helman: And so that's the thing. I feel like for the most part, winning Super Bowls is like you would have an elite one side of the ball and then the other one has to be good enough. But I do think that there was that little bit of stretch And I actually think there have been multiple eras of this. Like, I actually kind of painted the eras all the way back to 2000. From 2000 to like 2005, it was defense driven. Those were all teams that were top 10 in EPA per play on defense, if not like top two or three with like some of those Patriots teams and stuff like that. Obviously, the Ravens with like middling to even less than that offense in some cases.

11:43Dave Helman: And then I think right after that, remember in 2004, they changed some of the rules with like defensive pass interference. And I think that starts to open up a little bit of a different era. You get Peyton Manning winning the Superbowl. Obviously the giants win the Superbowl in 07, but like the Patriots having the year that they had on offense, I think is partly that breeze wins a Superbowl shortly after that with his offense, Aaron Rogers team.

12:04Robert Mays: I don't know the numbers on it, but they were a below average defense or definitely outside of the top 10.

12:08Derrik Klassen: It was not a good defense. They feasted on takeaways. Yeah.

12:11Dave Helman: And like, that's kind of my, that's, going to be one of my point, like that rule change started to trickle in this new era before everything caught up again. And I think teams like that were able to take advantage of that. Then I think you get to 2011, you get the new CBA with like rookie deals being a lot different. And I think that starts to like shift some things. And like, I think part of that too, that being a weird era was you had the 2011 Giants winning the Super Bowl and then the 2012 Ravens, which are both like major outlier Super Bowl winners. Like they were not elite on either side of the ball either of those teams they kind of just got hot at the right time uh and i think that like that is not even really included in an era and then i think like 2013 2014 2015 you get some of these elite defenses you get the legion of boom you have the broncos being what they are also a single high driven defense and then shortly thereafter you get the era that you're talking about where offenses respond to that and it becomes like okay if we can break all of those things those defenses are doing we can just print points in our defense doesn't have to be that good they just have to not give up 40 on the day and then I think obviously what we've come into the last couple of years defenses have now solved that a little bit and I do think you have to be a little bit more balanced on both sides of the ball you that quarterback driven era was like you could win with an elite offense and be bad on defense I don't think that you can be bad on either side of the ball anymore and win the Super Bowl you have to be like at least average on one side I

13:33Robert Mays: I think that's right. And looking back at this period from like 2016 through 2022, that's the stretch I want to talk about here before we get into the world we currently live in. If you look at just the ranks of all of these teams, I said the two teams finished outside the top 10 and EPA play on offense in the final four during that stretch. 22 teams did it on defense. 22 to six is the ratio that we're talking about. And there are teams that, I mean, the 2018 Chiefs were 31st in the league in EPA per play on defense. And then even when they were winning Super Bowls, the 2019 Chiefs were 18th. The 2020 Chiefs were 19th.

14:10Robert Mays: The 2020 Packers were 17th. The 2020 Bills were 16th. The 2021 Chiefs, we think about that team because they drafted the rookies, right? Like McDuffie comes in, Karloftis comes in. You know, it's defense, defense. They finished 21st in the league in EPA per play on defense that year. And we just had a lot of teams that were constructed that way. And one of the reasons that there's two main things that I always, when I was talking about the way I'd want to build a team, the things I'd want to focus on, the things I'd want to make sure I was good at. Two of the reasons I wanted to focus on offense throughout that entire era.

14:44Robert Mays: One was offense was stickier from season to season. Defense was just a little bit more volatile from year to year where you could be good on defense one year and then you were bad the next year. I think part of that is that offenses were in control in a way they are now. We could talk about that. The other side of it was, even if you had a really, really good defense throughout the season, in the playoffs, it was almost a guarantee that you were going to have to play at least one, probably multiple games where you needed to score 30 in order to get all the way there. And so if you were a defense first team, you could win 11, 12 games doing that.

15:19Robert Mays: But when you started to play against the best offenses in the league, that just wasn't going to be a viable path. Even like the 2018 Patriots are a team that comes to mind. They win an ugly Super Bowl, right? Super ugly. Just a disgusting game that the defense won for them. The previous two games in those playoffs, they scored 78 points combined. And for the most part during that run, you were going to need to do that.

15:44Derrik Klassen: I'm skipping ahead a little bit, but I would argue that's still probably true. You need to do it once. You need at least one game. I mean, even the 2024 Eagles needed 28 to put the Rams away. And obviously we remember Seahawks Rams in the NFC title game. Like you're probably going to need a game, at least one, where you're scoring 28, 30, 31 points, maybe 35.

16:07Robert Mays: But that's I think that's like a subtle but important change here. instead of having to do it multiple times. Now you probably just have to do it once if your defense is that good. And is that shift in the ratio enough where we can start saying that these defense first teams are just as viable as we get into the postseason in a way they weren't 10 years ago? I don't know where I fall on that. I'm not sure what the answer to that is yet, but I think the question is at least worth asking. Well, I think that was kind of like,

16:36Dave Helman: I don't think I knew it in the moment, but now that you paint that picture, I think that that was probably why I still thought the Texans were Super Bowl contenders when they were getting there. Like, even for as bad as it looked at times, I was like, you can still convince me this offense gets lucky one time and they score 30 points and they beat somebody they have no business beating. And then the defense just blanks the next opponent and they're in the Super Bowl. And so I think that that's where you're talking about. Whereas I think three years ago, if I saw an offense like that where I was like, man, they just got to get lucky once, I would be like, you don't need to get lucky once.

17:05Dave Helman: You do need to get, you know, they would need to get lucky three times. And that, again, I think is like why the Ravens Super Bowl and even to an extent like the Giants Super Bowl is a little weird. Like Joe Flacco did just kind of get lucky is the wrong word. Like he was playing well that year. He got hot. Yeah, he was hot. He was flaming hot. Like the Broncos game were. Yes, yes. That one was a heartbreaker. They should have gone further that year. But like that. Yes, like he just got extremely hot at the right time, which I think goes to Dave's point where he was saying something like you need good.

17:35Dave Helman: you need that level of quarterback play at some point. And like, they don't necessarily need to be the elite guy all the time, but like Joe Flacco did hit that high. I think that's the problem though, when you get into not having the elite quarterbacks is that you are banking a little bit that you're going to get lucky in the playoffs and have your defense kind of keep you in games while, while they hopefully get there. Whereas with the elite guys, there's still no guarantee they're going to play at their best level every single game, but there's a much higher chance that they are going to, and that you are going to have a chance to score 30 plus every time.

18:05Robert Mays: I don't want to get too ahead of ourselves and talk about the way that teams need to be constructed if we are moving into a new era, but I do want to talk about that. First, I want to take our first quick break and then come back and just establish how we got to this point with these defenses.

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22:26Robert Mays: I think I do want to talk about what you need on offense and the bar you need to clear for this type of build to work. But before we do that, let's talk about kind of how we've arrived in this moment and why we've arrived in this moment. because the idea that you can be a defense first team in the NFL in 2026 and be a really viable Super Bowl threat is rooted, Derek, in the ground that defenses have made up in catching up to offenses. So as you're trying to just explain or articulate how that's happened and how defenses have closed the gap and why defense feels more dangerous in 2026 than it did in 2020, what does that look like for you?

23:10Dave Helman: I mean, I think a lot of it comes down to something that we actually talked about on the lessons we learned from Offense's show a little bit is I think in previous eras, even the past four or five years, obviously the elite quarterbacks are able to be right consistently. They're guys who take a lot of autonomy in the offense and all that stuff. But even while that was true, offenses still had a better job of like you could just manufacture explosives. You could manufacture open receivers like it was just a lot easier to do that, given the way that offenses were or given the way that defenses were responding to a lot of what offenses were doing.

23:42Dave Helman: Now, I think it's a little bit harder to cook up some of those easy plays for the quarterback. I think you kind of need to run defenses out of certain things or the quarterback just has to be a superhero. And obviously guys like Josh Allen and Patrick Mahomes and Lamar Jackson, they can do that. But I think what we see is that having to do that in the playoffs, in a player playoff environment four times in a row against potentially two, three really, really good defenses. It starts to wear on you. And I think especially once we get to the Super Bowl, I think this is actually an important thing for winning the Super Bowl, because I don't think the final four contenders are that different in terms of like what teams are getting there and what it takes to get there.

24:21Dave Helman: but the teams that are winning are the defenses and I think part of that is I do think that extra four or five six days of preparation you get given that defenses are kind of ahead of the curve now on what offenses are doing I think that makes it a lot easier for them to choke a lot of those offenses out in ways that really were not true beforehand I want to just lay out a couple numbers

24:43Robert Mays: that I think are they don't do a complete job in explaining how we've arrived here but I think they illustrate it a little bit. So in 2020, which I think in 2020, for a lot of reasons, it kind of is the peak of a lot of this stuff. The fact that it was the COVID year and offenses could just communicate however they wanted to maybe juices these numbers a little bit, but the environment was already ripe for offenses to be dominating. So per next gen stats in 2020, there were 11 teams that had a 50 % success rate, five zero when using motion at the snap and a condensed formation at the same time.

25:19Robert Mays: There were 11 of those teams, 50. That's a huge success rate. I don't think there's a single offense in the league that had a 50 % success rate this year. This season, there were two. So you go from 11 to two. In 2025, there were 11 teams in the NFL on defense per next gen that faced 350 pass attempts with two high safeties before the snap, 11. In 2016, there was one.

25:48Robert Mays: so you go from one to 11 i i can't remember who it was but you go from one in 2016 to 11 in 2025 and so just the structure of defenses overall has shifted so much in the last 10 years but also i think that motion at the snap and condensed formation stat the reason i use that is those are the easy buttons those are the things that you could do to really give yourself an advantage as an offense and those advantages just don't exist to the same degree anymore defenses for the most part have figured out all of the things that offenses could do to make things much easier on them. And I don't know what the next step of that looks like, but until offenses regain the upper hand, we're in a moment where it feels like these defense first teams have a viability that they didn't a decade ago.

26:33Derrik Klassen: That is the fun thing though, because how long do we wait for that to happen? Experience tells me it won't be that long and I'm not smart enough to know what the pivot is. Maybe, I mean, it's so easy and we hear it so much to notice and talk about how the league is trending back toward the run game. And I do want to talk about, we can talk about Philadelphia in a minute, and the Super Bowl that they won two years ago. A devastating run game is a great way to get the upper hand if you're capable of building it. And maybe it comes off of that. Maybe it's something that, you know, the Ben Johnsons of the world are going to dig up that I can't even fathom.

27:12But I have a hard time believing that offenses won't be able to course correct.

27:18Derrik Klassen: And maybe it won't be in 2026, but I just can't imagine we're heading into this decade of defensive dominance. Like, I think it'll be more like a blip on the radar than anything.

27:28Robert Mays: It never lasts that long. And I think that in this era, especially—

27:32Derrik Klassen: The league will find a way to keep that from being the case.

27:35Robert Mays: The way the information travels at this point and just how flat the football information world is, I think that these cycles are sped up more than they used to be just because you're finding answers and ideas immediately. It's not like an offseason study that you're doing because you can have access to all the plays that worked at the tip of your fingers whenever you want them. And so but even the run game. Yeah, that's a good idea if teams are playing a lot of lighter boxes. but teams have gotten so good at figuring out the front structures and the body types and the way that they need to play in order to defend the run out of these boxes that even that Derek isn't the magic bullet that might have seemed like five or six years ago when teams were just starting to play this way and kind of showing the vulnerabilities of playing this way on defense.

28:20Dave Helman: Right and I think when that seemed like maybe that would be a vulnerability for some of these defense is obviously what Brandon Staley's Chargers looked like. A big part of the problem, it seemed like, would be like, oh, well, if we just give offenses five yard chunks at a time, they're just going to kind of run us over. And I still think that that is partly true. But I think even when you're making offenses do that, you're still making them be right 13 times in a row to get into the end zone. Whereas I think what these past couple of Super Bowl offenses have really done a good job of, not only is the run game with Philly, it was a lot more consistent.

28:54Dave Helman: I think with the Seahawks, it wasn't really until down the stretch, but they could get explosives. Like if we're going to have a little bit of a tougher time generating explosives through the air and the Eagles and the Seahawks could do that. Like the Seahawks could generate some, some big plays that way. Obviously the Eagles had AJ Brown and Devonta Smith, but their run games could get them like field flipping chunks. I mean, Kenneth Walker was insane in the Superbowl and Saquon Barkley didn't have his biggest game in the Superbowl, But for most of the playoffs and for obviously their entire season, he was unbelievable and was a reason that they were able to end games.

29:25Derrik Klassen: And so Saquon Barkley got them into the Super Bowl by sheer force of will.

29:31Dave Helman: Yeah, they don't get to the game without him being able to generate the explosives that they did. And then the Seahawks is almost the opposite. We're like, obviously, the defense played really well in that game. But their offense was able to move the ball and put points on the board because Kenneth Walker was just like generating 12, 20, 30 yard carries. almost out of nothing in making people miss. And I do think while efficiency is important in the run game, I mean, look at the Chiefs. Obviously, they're an extreme example because their run game was so unexplosive, but they were a good down-to-down rushing offense.

30:01Dave Helman: They just couldn't generate anything in terms of like 10, 20-yard gains, like those field flipping gains. I think no matter how you get them, that is still an incredibly important part of offense.

30:11Robert Mays: I think it's a non-negotiable part of this. Like the Seahawks, the Seahawks offensive stats from last year are kind of all over the place for a bunch of different reasons. So I think if you look at like EPA per play last year, they were 18th in EPA per play on offense last year. The Seahawks were not the 18th best offense in football last season. Like a lot of that is driven by the fact that they turned the ball over at a pretty high rate and their rate of negative plays was really high. But if you look at a bunch of other stats, the Seahawks were third in passing success rate per next gen last year.

30:40Robert Mays: They were seventh in passing success rate on true media. They were fifth in the NFL, Seattle was an explosive pass rate last season. They were a really explosive offense for almost the vast majority of the year. And so I think, you know, it depends on where you draw these lines and how you're bucketing these teams. But I think if you can be an outside of the top 10 sort of offense, according to some catch-all metrics, and still be the sort of offense that can win the Super Bowl if you are explosive. And Seattle was exactly that sort of offense last year.

31:10Derrik Klassen: I appreciate you saying it for me because that's what I was hinting at at the beginning of the show we can pick apart the warts and the downturns obviously seattle's offense over the second half of the season was nowhere near as consistently good as it was in the first i would say two months sam darnold finished the season 10th in epa per drop back like he was really really good and then we already mentioned it but played the game of his life in the nfc title game like I mean, he had an EPA per play of like 0.46 in that game. It was like in the 90th plus percentile of starts by quarterbacks last season.

31:47Derrik Klassen: So even obviously the defense is the story. The defense was the best in the NFL. But we're sitting here saying like, well, you don't need an all world quarterback to get this done. You still need a quarterback playing. I would say like a fringe top 10 guy at the at probably at the worst. Or maybe like that. Maybe there's a little bit of wiggle room there. But for all of his flaws, Sam Darnold still had a hell of a year last year. And I think they needed that like during the season to get to the point where you have the number one seed and then getting you over the finish line and into the Super Bowl.

32:20Derrik Klassen: You needed that.

32:21Robert Mays: It's interesting because I think that like Derek pointed out, you used to be used to have to get hot for multiple games. Now, if you have a guy that can get hot for one game, it might be enough. And I remember, you know, we think about and talk about him in a very different way now because he won the MVP. he's had multiple sustained years of really good success. The year after the Rams won the Super Bowl, we were kind of talking about Matthew Stafford as like an elevated version of this sort of quarterback where he wasn't considered like a blue, blue chip guy. He was somebody that was a tier down from that that had the opportunity and the ability to get hot for the right stretch.

32:57Robert Mays: And so this is not that new of an idea. I think for me, the most important takeaway here, and I think we can kind of transition this to, all right, what does this mean moving forward? It's just, it's a matter of degree, right? Like Matthew Stafford, I think, is a better NFL quarterback and even was before this latest stretch than Jalen Hurts or Sam Darnold were. So it was a slightly better version that you could win with. And I think that it's the same thing now where the idea that, all right, a slightly worse version of quarterback can do this. The idea that maybe you only need to get hot for one game versus two or three games.

33:31Robert Mays: And the other part of it, and this really stuck out to me when I was talking to Aaron Schatz last week when we were talking about the fact that the Texans are the Super Bowl favorite for FTN for DVOA numbers. The idea that you could come into the season projected to be the best defense in the league but the 12th best offense in the league and that is a viable Super Bowl team, that feels new. Like that is not the type of team we would pencil in as the Super Bowl favorite five or six years ago. And so I think those are like the slight changes where it used to be that, you needed your defense to just be good enough.

34:06Robert Mays: Are we in a period now where your offense can be just good enough for you to win the Super Bowl? It seems like the answer might be yes.

34:15Dave Helman: And again, I think they're a good example in the sense that, like, it depends how you're good enough manifest. In theory, the good enough manifest for the Texans that they can stay on track enough that they can throw six haymakers a game and they can get field flipping plays and they can get explosives and stuff like that. And I think part of why the previous era of quarterback driven stuff worked kind of for the inverse, like the Chiefs specifically, a lot of their defenses were mid. They were 18th, 19th, 20th in the league. And then they kind of turned it up in the playoffs. And part of that was Spags could generate turnovers.

34:49Dave Helman: He could generate negative plays with the things that they were doing, which is like the reciprocal. He could be explosive on defense. If you could just be average and then turn up the explosiveness when you need it, that was kind of the way to do it. And I do think now we've kind of flipped where on defense, you need to be like kind of all encompassing great or that's a viable way to do it. And then on offense, you don't have to be the best. You just need to not shoot yourself in the foot consistently. And can you get four field flipping plays to win us this game?

35:17Derrik Klassen: Here's my pushback and why I said I ultimately I didn't come all the way back around on quarterbacks and just quarterback and offense driving the conversation. and I agree I agree with that thought process and like looking through all of this I came to similar conclusions where I was like Texans viable Super Bowl contender in my mind yes Denver Broncos absolutely maybe those weren't things that I would have thought two years ago or even a year ago I didn't think it a year ago when we were building the table originally my

35:48Robert Mays: argument against the Broncos is that they were going to be outside the top 10 on offense and That was a non-starter. I said that less than a year ago.

35:55Derrik Klassen: I do still think I don't want to minimize what these teams that have won the Super Bowl with a defense first build have done. Because for instance, I already brought up the Eagles. Say what you will about him. And like he's, there are plenty of negatives to his game. The year the Eagles won the Super Bowl, Jalen Hurts was 11th in the league in EPA per dropback. Like the Eagles were sixth in EBA per play on offense. And they, as I already alluded to, I went and looked this up over the last, how many years did I go back? I went back to 2018 because that's the era that I was looking at. The Eagles were the seventh best rushing offense of any team in the NFL over that entire stretch.

36:37Derrik Klassen: So every team in the league over those eight seasons, top 10 rushing attack. Like they were still really, really special on offense, even though it didn't look as sexy as if you have Josh Allen or Patrick Mahomes or Lamar Jackson. So I still don't think you can minimize that, even if it's not as important as maybe we thought recently.

36:59Robert Mays: I think a couple of things from that are important to point out. One, you're right. Like the Eagles being the Eagles don't apply to this conversation as much as the 2022 Chiefs actually the 2023 Chiefs actually do. The Chiefs offense in 2023 is closer to where the Seahawks were, and they're actually a more analogous case than the 2024 Eagles were. That Eagles team was frustrating at times, but they still had a top 10 offense. But the point you're making about the running game being a viable path to being that sort of offense at the end of the season, I think that's really important because that, to me, speaks to why this era, it feels a little bit different.

37:34Robert Mays: In the same way that you can be a defense first team and win now, I think, Derek, there's an argument that you can be a run first team and still be an elite offense. Because even if defenses are better at defending the run out of light boxes, we still have seen a resurgence of the run game enough where that feels like a worthwhile identity on offense for a Super Bowl winning team in a way that it never could have been 10 years ago. Like you needed the quarterback, you needed the passing game to be what lifted you in a way where now you still need a little bit, but maybe not to the same extent.

38:10Dave Helman: I think I generally agree because, again, I think you can have the elite rushing attack or at least explosive rushing attack the way that the Seahawks were down the stretch that helps elevate everything else. And then I think that we've seen even a lot of these other elite quarterbacks in the recent like Final Fours, like obviously like Josh Allen and the Bills very recently have had an incredible run game and that's helped lifted them. And then there's less of a burden on Josh Allen. Obviously, part of the issue there is their receivers have just been so bad, which like this is also part of the conversation.

38:40Dave Helman: You still need to hit certain benchmarks with like everything. And I think that's kind of been part of the Bills downfall is they didn't in that respect. But still, even with an elite quarterback, they've proven that running attack can be really important. the Rams this year obviously like Matt Stafford wins the MVP he's incredible but a large part of their success was like the way that they ran the ball they were like as efficient as any run game has ever been and it helped them be the offense that they wanted to be and so I do still think that I think now running the ball is maybe not a necessity but I do think it is more necessary than it used to be and there used to be previous versions of I mean how long there was like the 10-year stretch in the NFL where there was like you know it doesn't matter how good you're running back is because all the running backs that were winning the Super Bowls were just like undrafted guys or fourth round picks or guys who were like not even on the team a year just like

39:28Derrik Klassen: stuff like that everybody's running back was like a 0.5 % cap charge or whatever the number was

39:34Dave Helman: it was like CJ Anderson and just and those guys played well but it was not necessarily the guys that we've come to see now who are like really more explosive backs who are actually helping

39:44Robert Mays: you give you something all right let's take one more quick break and then I want to come back and talk about where we go from here with all this.

39:54Derrik Klassen: It's smart to always have a few financial goals and a really smart one you can set earning cash back on what you buy every day. And with Discover, you can get this. Discover automatically matches all the cash back you've earned at the end of your first year. Seriously, all of it. And we trust you to make smart decisions. After all, you listen to this show. See terms at discover.com slash credit card. I'm Paul Tenorio. I cover soccer for The Athletic.

40:21Robert Mays: And I'm Amy Lawrence. I cover football for The Athletic.

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40:57Derrik Klassen: We've got more than 70 obsessive reporters on the ground covering the ins and outs from every game.

41:03Robert Mays: I almost forgot to mention the best part, Amy. Free access to the Athletics World Cup coverage in our app. Download the Athletic app and see you there.

41:19Robert Mays: so one devil's advocate question i wanted to ask about this before we talk about the future is this how it always was like the idea that quarterback show the uh astronauts looking at earth meme that's that's exactly that's exactly the question i wanted to ask the idea that because i think that when i conceived of this originally i want to talk about being quarterback centric but we're really talking about it being offense centric but if you look at quarterback specifically how long did we talk about the fact that if your quarterback had more than a 12 and a half percent cap charge you were going to have a really hard time winning the super bowl mahomes does it twice in a row and so that talking point kind of dies down but did we ever really leave the era where you need the most complete team to win the Super Bowl.

42:08Robert Mays: And now, again, the sliders and the knobs are a little bit different where it's a little bit more defense centric. But there was a long time where if you were paying a ton for your quarterback and you were deficient, really deficient in some areas, you were going to have a hard time winning the Super Bowl. And so the idea that we're framing this as some new era, is it really? Or was it always kind of like this and we just forgot about it for a couple of years? Again, this is more of devil's advocate point than anything.

42:33Derrik Klassen: This is a cop outing sir, but I think my homes makes it hard to answer the question because so many, so many of the skewing statistics, the things that would like change my opinion are things that the chiefs accomplished and the Patriots, the page and the Patriots as well, who also have an all time, the all time great quarterback.

42:53Robert Mays: Because those guys have won so many of the super bowls. I honestly feel like it skews so many of these conversations and continues to still skew those conversations.

43:01Dave Helman: But what's kind of funny is that Brady, in a way, represents both. And I think my answer to this question would be that well-rounded top 12-ish units, like on either side of the ball with great quarterback, like that is the default setting for Super Bowl winner. Like that, I think, is generally how it goes. And then I think some of these other areas that we've had in between that where, you know, again, what we were talking about 2016 to 2020, where it was just like all offense, That was all you needed or right after the 2004 rule changes where there was that like five year period where it was kind of like that.

43:34Dave Helman: I think those are more the aberrations and that default setting is like good to great quarterback with relatively good defense is kind of the default setting here. And guys like it's funny because Brady has has been both like like some of those Super Bowls that they want. Obviously, in like 2018 and stuff, their defenses were good. But like you said, they were having to score 35 points a game in some of those playoff stretches and they were good offenses. earlier in his career like I think it was the 2004 uh Super Bowl let me see if I have this right 2003 they were 16th on offense like Brady in a way kind of was like that the earlier eras of the Patriots they had some other good offenses and other good years but he's kind of like that to me is like what default setting Super Bowl winner could have looked like where you were somewhere between like above average on offense and you were great on the other side of the ball but your defense could or your quarterback could really come through and you needed him too

44:25Derrik Klassen: I think my answer boils down to the numbers we were talking about at the end of the show. No, I don't think it was always this way. Maybe it gets overstated a little bit because there was definitely a period there. I mean, 16 to 18, Brady's in the Super Bowl every year. And then before you could blink, we were doing the Mahomes chasing Brady thing. Like that was a long stretch of time where everything is measured by quarterback. But at the end of the day, like I'm looking at the chart that you were referencing earlier that you put together. I mean, the 2014 Patriots, defensive EPA per play, 14th in the league, jumping to the 2019 Chiefs, 18th, jumping to the 2021 Rams, 11th in EPA per play.

45:07Derrik Klassen: And then the closer you get, I don't want to confuse anybody, but on my own chart, I just did defensive DVOA. And since like 2020, there's only been one defense in the NFL that won the Super Bowl with a defensive DVOA outside the top 10. Like it's been very consistent other than the 2022 Chiefs. It's been very consistent that since that period in the 20 teens where maybe you can pull it off with the 14th overall defense or 11 or 12 or worse. since 2020, you're talking about top 10 defenses year over year. It doesn't always have to be number one, but seven, five, three, number one overall, like that's been consistent since 2020.

45:49And that's enough of a trend that no, I don't think it was always this way.

45:54Derrik Klassen: Like I think over the last five or six years, you need a little bit more from the rest of your team than you did back then.

46:00Robert Mays: There are a couple, we talked about some of the teams and the personalities that I think drove the way that we, the way that the last era felt in the NFL. And I think if we're going to one game, like there are two games, in my opinion, that to me define the way that team define what teams were chasing to what they wanted. It's who they wanted to be. It's that Chiefs Rams game on Monday night in 2018 to me is like a defining moment of that era. And the other one that I would say is the 13 seconds game coming out of that game. And I'm guilty of this. I remember sitting in Mitchell Schwartz's kitchen, recording a podcast after that game happened and just pounding table and being like, if you don't have one of these guys, what are you?

46:37Robert Mays: Like, you have no shot if you don't have one of these guys. And the funny part about that is neither of those teams went to the Super Bowl that year. Neither of them.

46:45Derrik Klassen: When you said that during our production meeting, that the 2021 Chiefs didn't even get there, I mean, I knew that, obviously, in the back of my mind, but that game is so ingrained in my mind that it still kind of caught me off guard to realize that like not even those chiefs reached the Super Bowl.

47:04Robert Mays: I think the reason I say that is because, all right, that game had a massive impact on the way that the league operated. Like the example I would always go to, in my mind, and I'm confident in saying this, the Deshaun Watson trade does not happen if that game does not take place. If that game doesn't have the feel that it does, the Browns do not trade for Deshaun Watson. Because in that moment, the idea was we need one of those guys. If you don't have one of those guys, what are you really? And I think the counter example of that, where we are now, is the same way that teams were using that as inspiration for how they wanted to build the things they wanted to chase.

47:42Robert Mays: I think now the idea that Sam Darnold and Jalen Hurts just won the last two Super Bowls is influencing how teams are going to build themselves over the next few years. So my question to that is, should it? should the last couple years and the model that it looks like should that be something that teams look at and say all right we can do it this way or is that fool's goal and is that going to create

48:05Dave Helman: a lot of problems and a lot of mistakes well so what i would say is that i think again what we talked about a little bit earlier i think the way that teams used to try to win with quarterback 14 whatever you want to say was that we would try to craft an offense that can go blow for blow with the other elite offenses and I think now the way that you're going to do it if you're going to have a Sam Darnold if you're going to have a Jalen Hurts you still need to get the offense to a certain level to raise them but you need the defense on the other side to be elite and that if there's any lesson I think it's not that building around these quarterbacks is the better way to do it like you would still like even if we're going to going at tier down I would much rather pay Dak Prescott whatever you're paying them than have to live in this wilderness and like have that guy and know that I have like some degree of consistency there um like I I would just much rather do that than have to live in the world where again you're you're running it uh with Sam

48:58Robert Mays: Darnold I also think that the cap hit part of it and being willing to pay Dak Prescott what you're paying Dak Prescott there are two things that come to mind with how important that idea is one if you look at the spending from like Seattle and even Philly over the last couple years it's not like they were going spending like tons and tons of money because they weren't paying the quarterback. Like Seattle spent$75 million on their offense last year, which was dead last in the league. The Seahawks were bottom 10 in defensive spending. And Philly, the year that they did it, were bottom 10 in defensive spending.

49:30Robert Mays: So this idea of, well, if we pay the quarterback very little and then we can build a super team around him and how much money we can spend, that hasn't really happened over the last couple of years. And so I don't, because that used to be the talking point, right? If we had a quarterback that we weren't paying anything, we could build a super team around him in the way the 2013 Seahawks did. And that was always the goal, but that's not really what's taken place over the last couple of years.

49:52Dave Helman: So I would say like that, that's the 2015 Broncos model, right? Of just like pay any amount of money for any amount of good players. We will build the best defense. And they were correct in doing that. The Eagles and the Seahawks, it's been a lot of draft picks. Like think about all the young, like it's just first and second round picks like we're going to build a death machine out of you know Devin Witherspoon and uh Byron Murphy uh not a draft pick but like trading assets to go and make sure you get Ernest Jones like they did invest assets it just wasn't like we're gonna pay top of the market for Milton Williams and free agency they just did it in a different way

50:30Derrik Klassen: I've long thought that that was cope anyway like oh we can't we can't afford it because the quarterback's expensive and and i know the eagles did a lot of this before jalen hurts got

50:40Robert Mays: expensive in the first place he's also never really been expensive because the way that they

50:43Derrik Klassen: play with the cap that's what i was about to say like where there's a will there's a way like if you want your quarterback to not be expensive you can do that and that's i know patrick mahomes is kind of his own animal at this point in his career but like if you go back through the history of that chiefs run like very rarely was mahomes's cap hit astronomical even after he signed the extension a because it was a huge extension and b that gives you the flexibility to move the money around so i've always thought that where there's a will there's a way uh i think the like loading up around an inexpensive quarterback is for the teams that are still searching like let's in a hypothetical world where the seahawks hadn't won the super bowl what might they be doing this year to get over that proverbial hump you know uh but you don't have to worry about it if you do it on your first try.

51:33Robert Mays: I think there are two different aspects that come into play here. One, teams are getting so creative with the cap that I think the cap hit of an individual quarterback just matters way less than it did a decade ago or 15 years ago. And two, because teams are getting more creative with the money and because the cap has exploded to this extent, the quality of free agents just like, you need, free agents are important in helping you win the Super Bowl. Players like DeMarcus Lawrence are important, but you don't have to pay DeMarcus Lawrence. DeMarcus Lawrence is not a top of the market player. Demarcus Lawrence is a guy that you got for a pretty reasonable price tag.

52:04Robert Mays: And so I'm with Derek where I actually think that, I didn't study this in depth, but if you wanna do it anecdotally, the injection of the right rookie class over like one or two year span feels more important than the ability to wield a ton of financial resources to go out and build a super team.

52:22Derrik Klassen: I was about to say, and this is beyond my expertise, I don't know how to build models, but could somebody out there build a model of whose rookie classes over the last year or two are providing the most value?

52:36Robert Mays: I would say do it over two years.

52:38Derrik Klassen: Yeah. I think two years span,

52:40Robert Mays: because I did this exact same thing for Philly. It was their year one rookies for the Seahawks. It was a lot of guys they had drafted the year before and this year's rookie class.

52:48Derrik Klassen: Who's getting the most from their past two rookie classes? And do you have a quarterback that clears the bar of what would be deemed necessary?

52:57Robert Mays: The Chiefs are the same way. So if you go look at the 2021 Chiefs, they drafted those goes out in 2021. Then they won the Super Bowl in 2022. So like the McDuffies, the Karloftises, even the 2021 Rams, this is a more isolated example, but they drafted Ernest Jones in the third round that year. Remember how important Ernest Jones was to the Rams surge on defense in the back half of that season? And so that stuff to me feels almost as or more important than whatever you're paying the quarterback.

53:25Derrik Klassen: I mean, to that point, for all the credit and hype that the Rams get for saying, screw the picks. What built them back into a contender over the last few years? The Byron Youngs of the world. Destroying two or three draft classes in a world in a row. Puka, Byron Young, Kobe Turner, Steve Avila, Jared Verse, Braden Fisk, the running backs, like all that stuff happening in very quick succession. And if you got the right quarterback, it can take you a long way.

53:55Robert Mays: This is actually something we probably could do, but stacking up, how many difference-making players do you have on a rookie contract?

54:02Dave Helman: Oh, that would be like a good roster health exercise.

54:05Robert Mays: Just rank the teams. Because if you look at Seattle last year, that was their superpower. It was Mike McDonald and the fact that they had a dozen difference-making players still on their rookie deals.

54:18Dave Helman: And even some of them, like, obviously ended up being better than we would have even thought. But like you could have projected into the season that not that A.J. Barner was going to be as good as he was, but they were having a fourth round pick like be a decent starter for them. Like just even as it's things as small as that, obviously scaling all the way up to like Devin Witherspoon being like all pro caliber at his best. Just like they kind of ran the gamut with just again having. And so that would actually be the last thing I would say is that building defense is obviously more important. And I do think that if free agency is going to be less of a tool, you've either got to do.

54:49Dave Helman: well the Rams have now done both where they drafted all the guys but then also now they've proven you have to trade for stars if you want them or you really have to leverage yourself in the draft and be like our first and second round picks we're going to get our difference makers on defense and then in free agency if we need to sign a Demarcus Lawrence at John Franklin Myers like players of that caliber we can go and do that to fill in the holes but we need to get our stars through the draft rather than through free agency so where do we land here it seems like collectively

55:19Robert Mays: the answer of is the offense centric era of dominance in the NFL over is yes.

55:27Derrik Klassen: I, I, I will maintain what I said at the top of the show. Like I'm, I'm, I'm willing to meet you somewhere, but I'm only willing to go so far because how long it will last is a different question. Not only that though, but again, Sam Darnold at the halfway point of last season was in MVP conversations. JSN one offensive player of the year. And again, Sam Darnold across the whole year was outstanding. And then the Eagles offense the year before that was outstanding in totality. So I'm just I'm not completely willing to minimize the importance of offense for these teams, even if their defenses were excellent.

56:03Robert Mays: It's obviously still important. I just think, again, it's more about what types of teams are capable of winning the Super Bowl. And I think that is where I land with this is that I'm just going to be more open-minded now than I even was last year about who actually has a realistic path forward. If you have the best defense in the league or the second best defense in the league and you have the 13th best offense, even as recently as a year ago, I would have been like, I don't know about that. Now, I think that, again, those two, like the rankings matter less than maybe what the makeup of the offense is.

56:36Robert Mays: If you're explosive, but you're inconsistent, that's more viable than something else. We're going to learn about the details of what matters here if we keep seeing teams like this be successful. But I think that the broad strokes way we would describe these teams, there is a different sort of team that I think is a championship caliber team than I would have five years ago.

56:56Dave Helman: I think the finishing like bow I would put on it is just that we're closer to equilibrium than we were four or five years ago. Like I think four or five years ago, you kind of could be unbalanced and just have the star quarterback and the star offense and win. I think now we're closer at equilibrium where, like you said, more kinds of teams can win. I actually still do think like you could have a world where you have an offense that is a fire-breeding dragon and you have the 18th best defense and you could still win the Super Bowl this year or next year. Like, I think that you could do that. I just think that there are other teams around.

57:27Dave Helman: Yes, I think you could.

57:28Derrik Klassen: So, OK, I wanted to say and you brought up the Broncos. It's a valid point to make that I didn't think the Seahawks were going to be a bad team last summer, but they just did not factor into my brain as a as a contender. And so an exercise like this, I think, absolutely should broaden your horizons of who you should consider capable of winning the Super Bowl. I agree with you, though, and I don't I don't know if I agree with Derek. Maybe I need to spend some time marinating on it. But I'm just asking the question. But to be fair, I'm just asking the question. doing this exercise like i come on this show so often and say like thinking about the bangles and the cowboys those are the two teams that come to mind where i'm like man all you got to do is be 18th in defense and who knows what could happen and after doing this and spending two days with the numbers i don't feel as strongly about that as i did before it's going to be fast but like

58:20Dave Helman: those bangles and cowboys teams were never 18th on defense or they were in 2020 years team no but But I'm saying like this year.

58:27Derrik Klassen: If they jump from 32 and 31 to 17 and 18, will it make that big of a difference? Is that enough now?

58:33Dave Helman: So I still think, yes, those teams can win. I think the difference would be that in 2020, 2021, if I were ranking teams that I think could win the Super Bowl, I would put that team first or second. Now I might be more like they're fourth on my list or something like that. But there are still every year like six teams who are good enough to have won the Super Bowl and just only ultimately one ends up doing it.

58:57Robert Mays: We do this so often. I'm so guilty of it because, again, I'm just rooted in the way that we talked about football for 15 years where it's like, oh, if you get to average, you can do it because we have so many examples of teams that have done it. I'm not saying it's not. I just wonder how true that is. and now because we just talked about this it used to be a case where man you were probably going to have two games where you needed to score 28 in order to win the super bowl are we going to be at a place now where inevitably in the playoffs you're going to run into a defense that's so good that you have to have a game where you allow less than 20 if you're going to win the super bowl and does that change the quality of defense necessary for you to ultimately get there I don't know.

59:39Robert Mays: Like, it's still so new. There's no definitive answer to that yet. But again, I think where we are now, it starts shifting the mode of thinking and, like, the little refrains you go to and the conventional wisdom around all of this, which to me is a very fun place to be.

59:56Dave Helman: That is really good. I still think that gets me to the point, though, of like, even those defenses, like the 18th best defense or whatever it is, if they can just get lucky in that one game, then they get passed. And again, that's almost like how the quarterback only kind of has to get lucky one time. Now, like, again, I think it's not that I think offense is still more valuable necessarily. I just think that we're closer to equilibrium and like where I would rank those kinds of teams has shifted. but like which teams can still get it done. I don't think has changed that much for me.

1:00:29Robert Mays: That's good for me because I deeply need a team that has the second best offense and the 18th best defense in the league to be a Superbowl contender in 2026. If can you imagine how cruel that would be? If for the first time, my team has that build and that now that build is no longer a way to win the Superbowl.

1:00:51Derrik Klassen: Not only that, but it's like, ah, the Bears, the monsters of the Midway, they're just not good enough on defense.

1:00:57Robert Mays: I've reckoned with that. That I'm fine living with. The idea that for the first time ever, they have the right build, quote unquote, for the last 15 years. And now it's just out the window. It would just be perfect. There would be nothing more fitting than that being where we ended with this.

1:01:12Derrik Klassen: This show got me really excited to have the table conversation whenever that winds up happening.

1:01:17Robert Mays: I'm telling you right now, buddy, it's July 9th. And so we'll be having it sooner rather than later. I booked all my hotels for training camp. Let's go. So we are, we are very, very close. A lot of fun stuff coming your guys way over the next month or so. I said it on yesterday's show, just a quick heads up next week. We will not have a show on Tuesday. We're still going to have mailbag on Monday and then it will be Wednesday, Thursday, Friday. We're just doing a couple other prep heavy shows that we wanted a little bit more time with, but it's not going to be too long here. And when we start training camp, we'll be at five shows a week.

1:01:46Robert Mays: So a lot of fun stuff coming your guys' way over the next couple of weeks before we ramp up the preview content in earnest. For now, that's all we got. Appreciate you guys listening. We'll talk to you very soon. Thanks for tuning in. Make sure to hit that subscribe or follow button so you never miss an episode. If you enjoyed what you heard, please like, comment, and leave a rating. We'll see you next time.

1:02:34Derrik Klassen: Transcription by CastingWords discover.com slash credit card.