standings_clean <- read.csv("https://myxavier-my.sharepoint.com/:x:/g/personal/martink35_xavier_edu/IQABnzBm6xBwR63nkPtmuckEATq5mP6U360idfuGkiW2TLc?download=1")2025 NFL Data Analysis
Overview
I am going to be looking at the standings from the 2025 NFL season from ESPN.com. My goal is to determine whether or not the NFL has become more of an offensive heavy league, and I will be doing analysis to determine whether offense created more wins this season than defense. I will compare stats like points for, points against, and point differential vs wins and losses.
Data Cleaning
I cleaned the data in a separate R file and created a static data set with the standings from this previous season. Next, I will add the table from the csv to conduct the analysis.
Points For vs Winning Percentage
My first visual will be a graph that will if there is a correlation between points for and the teams winning percentage. This will give me a baseline to see if my claim has any merit at all. I will also color code the conferences with AFC in red and the NFC in blue to give a nice visual of the differences in the conferences as well.
This graph shows us that teams that scored more points did have a higher winning percentage on average. While that helps us answer the question a little bit, it doesn’t tell the full story.
Points For vs Point Differential
To get a moire in-depth view of whether offense was king, we need to look at how many points teams scored overall, and their point differential (points for-points against), to see the teams that scored, but also didn’t play defense.
This graph looks similar to the first one, but it shows us teams like the Bills and Patriots outscored their opponents by nearly 200 points. Both of those teams, along with the Seahawks, had dominant offenses all season, but we can’t determine off of this whether that had anything to do with good defense, or just unstoppable offenses.
Offense vs Defense
The next graph will give us the best look at the comparison between offenvise and defensive production. I will rank the points for as offensive production and rank the points against as defensive production.
This graph shows us that the NFL as a whole had a mix of everything, which is to be expected. The best teams overall had a high defensive rank, and a high offensive rank which means that there isn’t much correlation to be taken between offense and wins from this graph.
Conclusion
Overall, it is pretty inconclusive to say that offense won more games than defense over this past season based on the analysis. Teams that won the majority of the games had a stellar offense and defense, so it is impossible to pinpoint which one was the more important side of the ball.