The old Bear Bryant adage was that “defense wins championships,” but is still that true in 2022?
It’s a score-first NFL, and modern offenses are so good that even the best defenses struggle to keep up. Elite offense wins games. Every team in the top 10 in Football Outsiders’ Offensive DVOA last season ranked top-12 overall. Teams in the top-10 Defensive DVOA rankings struggled to keep up, finishing at Nos. 10, 11, 14, and 25, with three of them missing the playoffs entirely.
An elite quarterback can carry an entire offense. We ranked the league’s QBs 1-to-32 yesterday, and there’s plenty of overlap here since QB performance makes up over 40% of the overall Offensive Rating per Football Outsiders. And fantasy football players know plenty about the running backs and receivers. But don’t overlook how important offensive lines and coaching schemes are either. Everything adds up together.
That’s why we need to rank every NFL offensive unit from 1 to 32, because it will give us a great order of how this season will play out and how we should bet the league. We’ll start at the top with three very familiar teams.