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Offseason Stat Series: Offensive and Defensive Success Rates and Who Matters More

The game of football is the literal and figurative collision between two teams, each with an offense and a defense, each striving after mutually exclusive, symmetric objectives: team one prefers their offense scores and their defense prevents scoring, while team two prefers *their* offense score while their defense prevents team one from scoring.

To what extent can a team control the outcome any given college football game? Is defense more important than offense?

In this article, I’ll examine one statistic - success rate - and attempt to answer whether it is determined on a game-by-game basis more by the offense or the defense.