The Athletic Football Show: A show about the NFL - Is the era of quarterback-driven success in the NFL over?

Episode Date: July 9, 2026

Name your favorite unicorn quarterback. Peyton Manning, Tom Brady, Patrick Mahomes, you name it. They're all done. Done! The era of a mystical quarterback leading your NFL team to a Super Bowl is over...maybe. The era of Seahawks-adjacent defensive domination is here...maybe. Robert Mays, Dave Helman, and Derrik Klassen are diving into why the NFL has felt so different lately, what the defining factors of this new (kind of) era are, and how long it will last.0:00 Welcome to the show2:58 Are we in a new era?6:30 Well, what was the last era?17:28 And why has the NFL felt so different recently?28:24 What exactly has changed since the previous era?41:12 And what do these changes mean for the future?48:51 Okay, what are the answers?Host: Robert MaysCo-Hosts: Derrik Klassen and Dave HelmanExecutive Producer: Michael BellerSenior Producer: Katy DuffySocial Producer: Scott KrinchFollow Robert on Bluesky: @robertmays.bsky.socialFollow Derrik on Bluesky: @qbklass.bsky.socialFollow Dave on Bluesky: @davehelman.bsky.socialFollow Robert on X: @RobertMaysFollow Dave on X: @DaveHelman_Theme song: HauntedWritten by Dylan Slocum, Trevor Dietrich, Ruben Duarte, Kyle McAulay, and Meredith VanWoert / Performed by Spanish Love SongsCourtesy of Pure Noise / By arrangement with Bank Robber Music, LLC Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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. Defense is 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? 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 Klasson. Let's get to that conversation right now. 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. 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 Hertz and Sam Darnold, which guys that we've probably underrated at times, but are still not the types of quarterbacks were used to winning Super Bowls,

the Patrick Mahomes, the Tom Brady's. 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 from home as a 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 describe 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? That's what I want to dig into today. I think the answer is unequivocally yes, and I will own a Mia 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 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, in the quarterback, you still need a very, very high level of quarterback play at some point

along the line to win a championship. 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. 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 off the scrap heap, whatever it's going to be. 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 Tannahill offense is top five. At the end of the day, the Patrick Mahomes one is going to be better. Like when it comes to nut-cutting time. It's less fragile for sure.

Yes, it's less fragile, exactly. Like, they are less immune to breaking down in those high-pressure scenarios. But now what we've seen over the last two years, specifically, is that if you are trying to win with the Ryan Tannahill, you still need to get the offense to a certain level. Obviously, the Eagles did this with all their skill players an 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. I think that to me is kind of where I took away from this. 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? I think there's a few reasons to zero in on a certain time period. For starters, the very, very good, useful advance. stats that make our job 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. Just saying. So you get Shanahan going to San Francisco in 17.

Sean McVeigh. 17 season. 17th season. 17th season. McVeigh 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. 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, 2012, 2013, 2014, and 2015, We have teams that made the final four in EPA that were outside the top 10 in EPA per play on offense.

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 for 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 DAGs and the 2021 Bengals. From 2012 to 2015, it happened every single year.

And so I do think that that, it might have 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, 2015 is the Legion of Boom defense era, like a little spike of that. 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 Loon 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, 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. 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. 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 areas of this. Like I actually kind of painted the errors 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. 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 Super Bowl. Obviously the Giants win the Super Bowl in 2007, but like the Patriots having the years. year that they had on offense, I think is partly that. Bree's wins a Super Bowl shortly after that with his offense. Aaron Rogers.

That's a 9th Saints team. I don't know the numbers on it, but they were a below average defense are definitely outside of the top 10. It was not a good defense. They feasted on takeaways. 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. 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. And 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. That quarterback-driven era was like you could win within 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 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 6 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 to play or defense. And then even when they were winning Super Bowls, the 2019 chiefs were 18th. The 2020 chiefs were 19th.

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, Carlottis 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. One was offense was stickier from season to season. Defense was a little bit more volatile from a 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 aren't 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, 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 mine.

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. 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. 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, 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. 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 giant 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 flared. He was flared. and hot.

Like I, the Broncos game were. Yes, yes. That, 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, 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 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. I don't want to skip 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. 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? I mean, I think a lot of it comes down to something that we actually talked about on the lessons we learned from offenses show a little bit is I think in previous areas, 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. 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. 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 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 together. get there. 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 that I think are, they don't do a complete job in explaining how we've arrived here, but I think they illustrated 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, 5-0, when using motion at the snap and a condensed formation at the same, time. 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 50% success rate this year. This season, there were two. So you go from 11 to 2. 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 2026, or excuse me, in 2016, there was one. So you go from one to 11. 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. 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 did in a decade ago. 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 jonsonsons of the world are going to dig up that I can't even fathom but I have a hard time believing that offenses won't be able to course correct. 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. It never lasts that long. And I think that in this era, especially-

The legal find a way to keep that from being the case. This is the way 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 off-season 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 with the run game, yeah, that's a good idea

if teams are being 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. Right. And I think when that seemed like maybe that would be a vulnerability for some of these defenses, 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. 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 big plays that way. Obviously the Eagles had A.J. Brown and Devontos Smith. but their run games could get them like field flipping chunks. I mean, Kenneth Walker was insane in the Super Bowl.

And Saquan Barkley didn't have his biggest game in the Super Bowl, 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. And so... Sequin Barclay got them into the Super Bowl by sheer force of will. 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.

where 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 kentith 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 like they were a good down-to-down rushing offense 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. 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. third in passing success rate per next gen last year. 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 it depends on where you draw these lines and try to 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 these sort of offense that can win the Super Bowl if you are explosive. and Seattle was exactly that sort of offense last year. 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 and EPA per dropback.

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. 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 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, you needed that. It's interesting because I think that like Derek pointed out, you 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 tiered down from that that had the opportunity and the ability to get hot for the right stretch. 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 J-1-Hertzer 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.

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 with 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 just be good enough, 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. 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 Chief 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. He could generate negative plays with the things that they were doing. He could be explosive on defense. 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. 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 here's my pushback and why i said i ultimately i didn't come all the way back around on quarterbacks and and just the 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 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. I do still think, I don't, 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, 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 Hertz was 11th in the league in EPA per dropback. The Eagles were sixth in EPA 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. 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. 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. 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. 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 Four is 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. You still need to hit certain benchmarks with like everything. And I think that's kind of been part of the bill's downfall as they didn't in that respect. But still, even within elite quarterback, Dave proven that running 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 your 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 stuff like that. Yeah, everybody's running back was. like a 0.5% cap charge or whatever the number was. It was like C.J. Anderson and just, and those guys played well,

but it was not necessarily the guys that we've come to see now who were like really more explosive backs who were actually helping 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. So one devil's advocate question

I wanted to ask about this before we talk about the future. Is this how, what always was. Like the idea that quarterback-centric teams. This whole show the astronauts looking at Earth meme? That's exactly the question I wanted to ask. The idea that, because I think that when I conceived of this originally, I wanted 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 12-5% 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 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 is some new era

is it really or we're. wasn't always kind of like this and we just forgot about it for a couple years. Again, this is more of a devil's advocate point than anything. This is a cop outing, sir, but I think Mahomes 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 accomplish. And the Patriots. And the Patriots as well, who also have an all-time, the all-time great quarterback.

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. 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 the 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. 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 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 Super Bowl. Let me see if I had this right. 2003. They were 16th on offense. Like Brady in a way kind of was like 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 to.

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 a 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. 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 22 chiefs. It's been very consistent that since that period in the 20 teams 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. And that's enough of a trend that, no, I don't think it was always this way. 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. 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 the table and being like,

if you don't have one of these guys, what are you? 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. When you said that during our production meeting, that the like 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. 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 saying this, the Deshawn 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 Deshawn 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 are using that as inspiration for how they wanted to build the things they wanted to chase. I think now the idea that Sam Darnold and J. and J.1 Hertz 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 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 Darnel, 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 go. going to tear 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 running it with Sam Darnold. I also think that the cap hit part of it and being willing to pay Dac Prescott where you're paying Dack 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 of 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 the, and Philly, the year that they did, it was were bottom 10 in defensive spending. 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 years. And so I don't, because that used to be the talking point, right? If we had a quarterback there 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 years. 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 Byron Murphy, 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 going to pay top of the market for Milton Williams and free agency. They just did it in a different way. 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 I know the Eagles did a lot of this before Jalen Hertz got expensive in the first place. He's also never really been expensive because the way that they 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 Chief's 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. 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? But you don't have to worry about it if you do it on your first try. 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.

And so I'm with Derek where I actually think that I didn't study this in depth, but if you want to do it anecdotally, the injection of the right rookie class over like one or two year span feels more important than the ability to wheel the ton of financial resources to go out and build a super team. I was about to say 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. I would say to do it over two years. Yeah. A two years span. 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. 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? The chiefs are the same way, right? 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 Carlottises, 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, like 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 at this point.

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, uh, Byron Young, Kobe Turner, Steve Avella, Jared Verst, Braden Fisk, uh, the running backs, like all that stuff happening in very quick succession. Uh, if you got the right quarterback, it can take you a long way.

This is actually something we probably could do, but stacking up, how many difference making players do you have on a rookie contract? Oh, that, that's, That would be like a good roster health. 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. 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 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,

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 the answer of is the offense-centric era of dominance in the NFL over is yes I will maintain what I said at the top of the show

like 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. Well, not only that, though, but again, Sam Darnold, at the halfway point of last season, was in MVP conversations. JSN won 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, again, I'm just, I'm not completely willing to minimize. the importance of offense for these teams, even if their defenses were excellent. 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 once last year about who actually has a realistic path forward. If you have the best defense in the league or the second best defense 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 what the makeup of the offense is.

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. I think the finishing like bow I would put on it is just that we're closer to equal. 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 of 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 reading 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. Yes, I think you could.

So, okay, 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 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 know if I agree with Derek. Maybe I need to spend some time marinating on it, but... I'm just asking the question, 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 Bengals and the Cowboys. Those are the two teams that come to my. 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 fascinating. But like those Bengals and Cowboys teams were never 18th on defense or they weren't 2020. No, but I'm saying like this year. If they from 32 and 31. to 17 and 18, will it make that big of a difference? Is that enough now? So I still think, yes, those teams can win.

I think the difference would be that in 2020, 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 their 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. 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. 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. 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 past. 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.

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 Super Bowl contender in 2026. Can you imagine how fucking cruel that would be? If for the first time for 10 years, my team has that build and now that build is no longer a way to win the Super Bowl. Not only that, but it's like, ah, the bears, the monsters of the midway, they're just not good enough on defense. I've reckoned with that.

Now 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 in that being where we ended with this. This show got me really excited

to have the table conversation whenever that winds up happening. 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 today. Let's go. So 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 gonna have a 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 so a lot of fun stuff coming your guys way over the next couple 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.