Does Defense Win Championships? The Vikings May Find Out

Heading into their bye week, the 5-0 Vikings had the top scoring defense in the league. Measured by EPA, they are in contention to be one of the greatest defenses in NFL history.

Can the Vikings’ Defense Win ‘Em a Super Bowl?

The offense is a different story. The team ranks 22nd in the NFL in points scored per game, and they’ve somehow scored even fewer points per game when QB1 Kyler Murray has been healthy.

An old adage says that defense wins championships. This would be great news for the Vikings, but is it true?

To begin, it is well-established that defense is not as stable as offense in the NFL. In other words, a high-achieving defense like the Vikings’ is more likely to regress over the remainder of the season than a high-achieving offense like the Bills’. This raises a legitimate question about the Vikings’ ability to sustain their defensive success.

That said, after three seasons of increasing excellence from the Brian Flores defense, it’s hard to believe that the defense is just going to fall apart. If the defense is able to maintain their position atop the NFL, how realistic is a Vikings Super Bowl in 2026?

To study this, I looked at the offensive and defensive scoring ranks for every Super Bowl winner since 2002:

A few things stand out: first, the number 1 defense in the NFL has won the Super Bowl five times, while the number 1 offense has won it just twice. In recent history, defense really has won championships.

The worst offensive rank for a number 1, Super Bowl champion defense was 20, achieved by the 2008 Pittsburgh Steelers. At 22nd, the Vikings likely need to show offensive improvement if they want to hoist the Lombardi trophy, but such an accomplishment would not be unprecedented. 

Another thing that stands out from the data is how rarely the top offenses/defenses actually win the Super Bowl.

Let us define a team’s Combined Rank to be the sum of their offensive and defensive ranks (for instance, the Vikings’ current Combined Rank is 23=22+1). If offense and defense were completely uncorrelated (which is approximately true in the modern NFL), the best team in the NFL would, on average, have a Combined Rank of around 7 or 8.

In the past 24 seasons, however, the average Combined Rank of a Super Bowl champion has been a whopping 15.7. The worst offenders are the 2011 Giants (with a Combined Rank of 34) and the 2007 Giants (with a Combined Rank of 31). The success of these teams shows that, in a sense, any playoff team is a Super Bowl contender: when it comes to the NFL postseason, all you need is a chip and a chance.

Having said that, the plot above does seem to suggest that most Super Bowl teams have either an elite offense, defense, or both (as evidenced by the number of data points located along the axes). 12 of the last 24 Super Bowl champions had either top 2 offense or a top 2 defense, suggesting that one elite unit often compensates for modest performance on the other side of the ball.

The Vikings currently rank 3rd in the NFL in point differential, showing that their excellent defense (and special teams) have more than made up for their offensive woes so far.

The Vikings have benefitted from a relatively easy schedule so far, and things will get much more challenging when they welcome the Bills and 49ers in November. Still, elite teams beat up on bad ones, and that’s exactly what the Vikings have done so far. There’s plenty of football left to be played, but their defensive performance thus far makes it clear: the Vikings are a legitimate Super Bowl contender.

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