A victory for conventional wisdom

We finally discovered the reason – or a reason – behind the faith so many pigskin "pundits" put in the ground game.

 

Pounding the pigskin really does matters in the one game that everybody watches: the Super Bowl.

 

Most Cold, Hard Football Facts readers know that passing well is of paramount importance: great teams throughout history have always passed the ball effectively, especially when measured by our preferred method, yards per attempt. Keeping the ball out of the opposing team's hands – i.e., not throwing INTs – is also critical.

 

These factors are critical in the Super Bowl, too.

 

But nothing is more critical on Super Bowl Sunday than pounding the ball down the throats of the opposition, sapping him of his life and his will. That's right, we said it.

 

In fact, we can hear Merril Hoge and Steelers fans everywhere popping a high hard one right now, with the echoing  voice of John Facenda describing Pittsburgh's dominating 57-rush-attempt effort against the Vikings in Super Bowl  IX ringing through their heads.

 

We've never found a high correlation between rushing yards or average per rush attempt when it comes to winning games. There is a pretty good correlation between running the ball often and winning, though the cause-or-effect aspect remains up for debate.

 

Either way, it definitely matters in the Super Bowl.

 

We looked at key rushing and passing stats from all 42 Super Bowls to determine which factors had the highest correlation to winning, and it turns out that rushing attempts stood at the top of the list.

 

Here's the record of Super Bowl contenders based upon their proficiency in various areas. (In the event that the total doesn't add up to 42, it's because teams were tied in that indicator in the games not accounted for.)

 

Indicator	Record
Ran the ball more often	36-4 (.900)
Threw more effectively (YPA)	36-6 (.857)
Threw fewer INTs	30-5 (.857)
Ran for more yards	35-7 (.833)
Ran more effectively (YPA)	24-18 (.571)
Threw for more yards	21-21 (.500)

 

When looking at those numbers, it pays to keep in mind that you can consider them from the point of view of the defense, that is, who played better defensively in these areas:  

 

 

A few things jump off the page:

 

The 42 Super Bowl champs have not run much more effectively than their opponents. In fact, the 42 Super Bowl champs have averaged a mere 4.05 YPA – just about dead on the historical average of 4.0 for any team or any game. The losers, meanwhile, have averaged 3.83 YPA on the ground. That's a small difference.

 

The big difference is in the number of attempts.

 

The 42 Super Bowl champs have averaged 37.3 attempts. The losers, meanwhile, have averaged just 22.7 attempts.

 

The importance of running the ball well in the Super Bowl does not diminish the importance of passing the ball well – teams that pass more effectively have won 36 of the 42 Super Bowls.

 

What this combination of statistices does, though, is lend credence to the belief of many pigskin purists that you need to run to set up the pass. There's not a great deal of statistical evidence to support this theory in the regular season. But it's clearly important in the Super  Bowl.

 

You can run often – but it only helps if you have the ability to exploit via the pass the gaps in the defense your ground game creates.

 

The classic example is Bob Griese in Miami's victories in Super Bowls VII and VIII. The Dolphins ran the ball a whopping 90 times in those two games for 380 yards – a solid but impressive average of 4.2 YPA, but a smash-mouth 45 rush attempts per game.

 

Griese attempted a mere 18 passes in those two games combined, but he made his opponents (Washington and Minnesota) pay for their focus on the ground game. He completed 14 of those 18 passes for 161 yards – an impressive 77.8 completion percentage and a rock-star average of 8.9 YPA.

As we've often noted, those 350- and 400-yard passing day look good in the headlines and make those fantasy  fans of imaginary-fake football happy. But passing for a lot of yards is virtually meaningless in real football, as we've documented many times.

 

And it's obviously meaningless here in the Super Bowl, where the teams with the big passing days are a mere .500. Just look at Tom Brady: he passed for fewer yards than his opposing quarterback in two of his three Super Bowl victories, and he passed for more yards than Eli Manning last year in New England's crushing Super Bowl defeat.

 

The Super Bowl trends here seem to favor the Steelers, who are easily likely to run the ball more often than the Cardinals.

 

Pittsburgh averaged 28.8 attempts per game on the ground this season (9th); compared with just 21.2 per game (dead last) for the Cardinals.

 

But as we noted during the season on Boston's WEEI.com, a balanced Cardinals team is a dangerous Cardinals team. And the Arizona brain trust has certainly taken that analysis to heart here in the postseason.

 

The Steelers still top all playoff teams with 35.0 attempts per game in the postseason; but the Cardinals are not far behind, with an average of 33.3 attempts per game on the ground. It's been their most consistent effort at rushing the football this year, and it's yielded unusually great results.

 

So Super Bowl history, and the recent history of these two teams, tells us that the Super Bowl comes down to two factors:

ONE - Can the Cardinals commit to the run? If they do, Warner has proven he can exploit opposing defenses.

 

TWO - Can Ben Roethlisberger exploit his team's commitment to the run? You know the Steelers are going to pound away on the ground, no matter how effective those attempts are. And in 2008, a year in which the Steelers were a moribund 29th in average per rush attempt, they were rarely effective on the ground. He has to be his usual playmaking self to make Arizona pay for its focus on the run.

 

As always, we hate to give conventional wisdom a pat on the back, but you can never dispute the Cold, Hard Football Facts: Super Bowl XLIII will be a battle of who can establish the run and then who can exploit their opponent through the air.