The US Government isn't the Only Place that Spends too Much on Defense

Defense wins championships. It’s an adage almost as old as the game of football itself, and one most reasonable fans have long since grown sick of. The basic idea is that while offense produces all the stats and all the stars, ultimately the defensive side of the ball is just as, if not more, important to actually winning football games.

This belief has become even harder to back up as league rules and schemes have shifted more heavily in favor of the offense over the past twenty years. But it saw a resurgence last year, as scoring fell across the league and the final four was represented by teams quarterbacked by Case Keenum, Nick Foles, and Blake Bortles, with Foles’s Eagles ultimately winning the Super Bowl.

Less than a year later, it is becoming increasingly clear how much of an outlier the 2017 season was. Scoring has leapt again across the league to the highest level in history, and the teams at the top of the league are the teams that can score a lot of points. The three highest scoring teams in the league are the Rams, Chiefs, and Saints, who also happen to be the teams with the three best records in the league.

More glaring is what happened to the teams that were in the championship round a year ago. The Vikings, Eagles, and Jaguars were a sign of the resurgence of defense, and a year later they are three of the most disappointing teams in the league. Minnesota is clinging desperately to a playoff spot, while both Philadelphia and Jacksonville are on the outside looking in. All three teams returned essentially the same core on the defensive side of the ball, and two of the three are still playing defense at a high level, with Minnesota and Jacksonville still in the top 10 of defensive DVOA. And yet, they haven’t won games in the way they did a season ago.

This inconsistency among defensive teams is hardly a revelation. A couple years ago I looked at offensive and defensive performance from year to year, and I found that offensive DVOA was more than twice as sticky as defensive from one year to the next. And since then we have only gotten more anecdotal evidence, perhaps as best explained by the past three years of the New York Giants.

During the 2016 offseason the Giants went all out in free agency on the defensive side of the ball, signing Janoris Jenkins, Damon Harrison, and Olivier Vernon to massive long term deals. And in the immediate aftermath, it looked like this was an absolutely brilliant decision. New York’s defense leapt to the top of the league in 2016, carrying the team to a playoff berth. Even after a first round exit, they were feeling pretty good about where their team was at, with the core of an elite defense locked up for years to come.

Since then they have won a total of seven games. Not only has their record fallen off a cliff, their defense has as well. After finishing second in defensive DVOA in 2016, they have been in the bottom ten each of the past two years, and they have already started carving up the expensive core of their defense to start over. The one year jump in defensive performance was not sustainable, and their record has reflected that.

The Giants were the clearest example of the pitfalls of investing heavily on the defensive side of the ball, at least until this year. We have a new contender now in Jacksonville, a team that dedicated incredible resources in both the draft and free agency towards building their defense. A year ago this allowed them to cover the blemishes at quarterback, getting out to early leads and salting the game away with an aggressive ball-hawking defense and a physical running game. In 2018 however, the turnovers haven’t been quite as present on defense, they haven’t had the same luck jumping out to early leads, and they have been forced to rely more on Blake Bortles, with predictably disastrous results.

It is still possible to win games through a strong defense and running game. We saw an example of this early in the year, when the Washington Redskins jumped to the head of the NFC East on the back of Adrian Peterson and an emerging defensive line. Before the injury to Alex Smith they were 6-3, and in those nine games they did not experience a single lead change. When they scored first, they held on to the lead until the end of the game. When the other team scored first, they were unable to come back.

Playing this style gives an incredibly small margin of error, which is why it is unsurprising when situations reverse from one year to the next. It’s typical to look for regression by teams that outperform in tight contests (such as Minnesota last year), but for a team like Jacksonville even blowout victories can easily be swung the other way by a change in circumstances early in the game. Playing with a lead and playing from behind are very different situations, even in the first half when there should be plenty of time to overcome any deficit.

The volatility of investing in the defensive side of the ball can be both a positive and a negative thing. For a team looking for a jump like the 2016 Giants or the 2017 Jaguars, it’s  easier to turn things around by loading up on talent defensively. But these jumps are often followed up by equally drastic falls, and investing in offense provides a much longer competitive window.

This is my intuition, and I wanted to find some way to quantify the concept of investment. There are two major ways that teams invest in players, either through the draft or with big contracts handed out to veterans. (They also invest in trades, but these are rarer and more complicated to track and quantify, so I ignored them).

I calculated the percentage of investment towards offense and defense for both of these categories. For the draft I looked at the last four years—the length of rookie contracts—and I calculated the total draft value given to each side of the ball using Chase Stuart’s draft value model. For spending I looked at a team’s entire roster and took the sum of the average annual value for each player’s contracts (using this rather than cap hit, because contracts are often structured with weird spikes and drops in cap value).

This provided the following table of percentage invested on the offensive side of the ball. A higher number means more investment in offense, while a lower number shows a team has been defense focused in building their roster.

	Draft	Money	Average
LAR	85%	47%	66%
SEA	53%	65%	59%
NYG	56%	57%	57%
IND	45%	68%	57%
CLE	49%	63%	56%
PHI	55%	56%	56%
OAK	40%	70%	55%
BAL	56%	52%	54%
ARI	54%	53%	53%
HOU	62%	44%	53%
DET	55%	50%	53%
TAM	53%	52%	52%
CIN	55%	48%	51%
TEN	60%	43%	51%
LAC	46%	56%	51%
CHI	56%	46%	51%
CAR	50%	49%	50%
NWE	46%	53%	50%
WAS	45%	54%	50%
ATL	30%	65%	47%
MIN	47%	47%	47%
DAL	37%	57%	47%
PIT	36%	58%	47%
DEN	54%	38%	46%
NYJ	43%	49%	46%
KAN	40%	51%	46%
GNB	25%	66%	45%
NOR	33%	57%	45%
MIA	48%	41%	45%
SFO	35%	52%	44%
BUF	41%	44%	43%
JAX	41%	41%	41%

The names at the very top and very bottom of the list immediately jump out. I’ve already discussed the Jaguars at length, and it isn’t a surprise to see them leading the field in defensive investment. Even after handing out big contracts this offseason to Andrew Norwell, Donte Moncrief, and Bortles, the sheer amount they’ve given to Malik Jackson, Calais Campbell, and AJ Bouye over the past few years continues to drag them down.

On the other side, it is equally unsurprising to see one of the league’s best offenses sitting at the top. The Rams have been extremely aggressive about paying talent on the offensive side of the ball, adding veterans Andrew Whitworth and Brandin Cooks, as well as giving a big extension to Todd Gurley. If anything this number actually undersells how heavily they have invested on that side of the ball, as it doesn’t include the first round pick they traded for Cooks or the premium they paid to move up and select Jared Goff (the same can also be said about Philadelphia, Kansas City, Houston, the Jets, and to a lesser extent Chicago).

Look deeper in the list and some other trends start to emerge. Seattle, Indianapolis, and Cleveland are all in the top five of offensive investment, and they have all exceeded expectations and taken major steps forward as the season has gone along. While at the bottom, teams like Buffalo, San Francisco, and Miami are fighting just to stay afloat with defense oriented teams. Buffalo in particular is utterly devoid of talent on the offensive side, and even after moving up into the top ten to draft Josh Allen they are facing a major uphill climb just to reach acceptable in that phase of the game.

There are a couple of notable exceptions that stand out at the bottom of the list. Both New Orleans and Pittsburgh are among the most defensive oriented spenders in the league, and both are also among the top teams in their respective conference. They are very similar stories to each other, teams led by Hall of Fame quarterbacks who have spent the past five years desperately trying to scrape together basic competence on the defensive side of the ball, with very mixed success. But the strength at quarterback has allowed them to elevate their offenses despite an absence of investment there, giving them a chance to win even while their roster construction leaves something to be desired.

Of course, having a Hall of Fame quarterback is easier said than done, and it is hardly a foolproof strategy. Green Bay is also in the bottom ten of offensive investment, and it has been glaringly obvious this year as they have been forced to turn to low drafted rookies just to keep their passing attack afloat. Where the Steelers and Saints have excelled finding star skill position players in the later rounds of the draft (JuJu Smith-Schuster, James Conner, Michael Thomas, and Alvin Kamara are all still on rookie contracts), the Packers have left their offense completely barren of talent to work with.

One of the more fascinating teams on this list is Chicago. At first glance you’d assume they would be in a similar position to Jacksonville last year or the Giants two seasons ago. They’ve run out to a surprise lead in the NFC North thanks to the best defense in football, the sort of performance that just screams regression for next year. They have spent top ten selections on Leonard Floyd and Roquan Smith in the past three years, and while this analysis doesn’t capture the massive package of draft picks they sent to the Raiders for Khalil Mack, it does include the record breaking contract they signed him to prior to the season.

And yet, the Bears sit squarely in the middle of the pack in terms of offensive investment. They have been just as dedicated to building that side of the ball, and while the results haven’t quite showed up yet, there is still a lot of potential in Mitchell Trubisky, Allen Robinson, and the other players on this unit. When things inevitably regress on their defense (notably, when Eddie Jackson stops scoring touchdowns in every game), there is a chance the offense can step forward and pick up the slack.

Am I certain this is going to happen? No, I’m not. Right now Chicago’s offense is merely average, and it is more difficult to take a jump on that side of the ball than on defense. There is still a very real chance that this season is a flash in the pan for them rather than the first sign of sustained success, and among the young teams at the top of the league I would take the futures of the Rams or the Chiefs over the Bears in a heartbeat, especially as they are left with little money and few draft picks to truly try to improve their offense. Only time will tell whether they can continue to win as a defense first team, or if they will fall back to Earth like so many others have done before them.