The Correlation Between Defensive PPG and QB Super Bowl Rings

In this age of advanced metrics, analytics, and fancy-sounding acronyms, sometimes the simplest numbers tell the story.

One place where that appears to be the case is in the relationship between the number of Super Bowl rings a quarterback has and how good his defense is. This seems like something that should be pretty straight forward. It’s tough for any quarterback to win a championship (or multiple championships) if he doesn’t have a good team around him, and specifically, a good defense.

In that respect, if we were looking for the one non-offensive metric that means the most to a quarterback’s ability to win games, it’s hard to think of one more meaningful than points allowed.

It’s a simple theory really. The fewer points the defense allows, the fewer points the offense has to generate to win a game.

Mind blowing, I know!

Somehow, this always escapes the discussion about quarterback legacies and top-10 lists or GOAT discussions, which are all seemingly centered solely around rings.

Below, I’ve put together a list of some of the best quarterbacks to ever play the game (with more than 10 seasons as a starter under their belt, so no Mahomes for now), as well as how good their defenses were at preventing points. The columns show the total seasons each had as a starting quarterback, how many of those seasons their defense ranked in the top-10 in points allowed, and then the number of Super Bowl appearances and wins they had:

Kind of interesting huh? Tom Brady has 7 wins and 10 appearances, and barely ever had a defense outside of the top-10 in points allowed (Just 4 in 21 seasons as a starter).

Joe Montana won 4 Super Bowls and also barely ever had a defense rank outside the top-10 in points allowed (just 3 in 13 seasons as a starter).

Conversely, quarterbacks like Aaron Rodgers, Drew Brees, and Dan Marino barely ever had top-10 defenses and each only has 1 Super Bowl appearance. Hmmm…

We can also look at this on a percentage basis. Below is the percentage of seasons each quarterback had a top-10 scoring defense, as well as the percentage of seasons each played in or won a Super Bowl:

It’s not a 1-to-1 ratio, but there’s a pretty strong correlation between defensive points per game and Super Bowl appearances/rings for these quarterbacks.

Notice this list doesn’t include just anyone. These are the best of the best. I’m not comparing Tom Brady to Dave Brown here. I’m comparing Tom Brady to Peyton Manning and wondering why the two near identical quarterbacks have such a drastically different number of rings, for instance.

Hopefully this adds some additional context to that discussion.