Out Of Contrast

By Robert Ferringo

One of the main things that has been bothering me over the last two weeks while trying to handicap the Super Bowl is the fact that we’re dealing with two teams that are just too similar. And they are similar in the wrong way.

Here’s the formula: one kind of soft, high-scoring, pass-first offensive team with a sort of suspect defense facing off against a more gritty, defensive-oriented club that is more run-first and tries not to make mistakes. Those are the Yin and Yang of NFL styles and I don’t think it’s a coincidence that those two visions end up opposing one another in most Super Bowls.

Not convinced? Here are the last 10 Super Bowl matchups:

Pittsburgh (defense, run) vs. Arizona (offense, pass)
New York Giants (defense, run) vs. New England (offense, pass)
Indianapolis (offense, pass) vs. Chicago (defense, run)
Pittsburgh (defense, run) vs. Seattle (offense, pass)
New England (defense, run) vs. Philadelphia (defense, pass)*
New England (defense, run) vs. Carolina (defense, run)*
Tampa Bay (defense, run) vs. Oakland (offense, pass)
New England (defense, run) vs. St. Louis (offense, pass)
Baltimore (defense, run) vs. New York Giants (defense, run)*
St. Louis (offense, pass) vs. Tennessee (defense, run)

Of those 10, the Patriots-Eagles Super Bowl was the hardest to categorize because they were really two strong all-around teams. But other than that I think that a pretty obvious theme has evolved.

(And of course all of those teams had solid “opposites”. They were in the Super Bowl for crying out loud. But I don’t think that you can argue about the basic breakdown of the identity of these teams. Also, In the 90’s things weren’t as cut and dry. With no salary cap and real revenue sharing the teams at the high end were just complete, total football teams. I mean, how would you categorize those Dallas teams? We could parse through and come up with some identities, but the bottom line is that is hasn’t been as pronounced as it has been in the last 10 years.)

So the general theme is one defense-running team squaring off against an offense-passing team. And over the last decade the defense-run teams have had their way, going 8-2 in The Big Game overall and 5-2 when matched up against an opponent that was offense-run. You can also see that in the other situations where we had two similar teams matched up it was defense-run vs. defense-run (New England-Philly, New England-Carolina, Baltimore-Giants). And, interestingly enough, the underdog managed to lose all three games but cover two of them.

So that brings us to this Sunday’s Super Bowl. This is the first time, really, that two offensive-oriented, pass-happy teams have lined up and set themselves up for a shootout. So since there is no real blueprint for how this game is going to shake out (do you take the better quarterback, the better defense, the better running game, etc.?) I think that this has been one of the most difficult games to handicap in the last decade. Besides that Patriots-Eagles game I have known and been very confident about every Super Bowl this decade and have been correct in seven of the 10 games. But I have to say that I think if we were ranking this year’s Super Bowl in terms of value it would be one of the lowest because the teams are such mirrors of one another: they do the same things right, they have similar approaches, and they have similar weaknesses.

So keep that in mind. And it will be interesting to see next year if we have a rebound year from teams that prefer to grind it out and do their damage with defense and running the ball.