For what it's worth, for the football playoff pool this past season, I went with a defense first theme and picked teams with the best defenses almost exclusively.  In spite of picking Seattle to win the Super Bowl, I was mathematically eliminated after the Wild Card round as the better quarterbacks won the overwhelming majority of the games that weekend and throughout the playoffs.  In fact, I lost every game, including my AFC Super Bowl pick the first week, and it didn't get much better after that.

 

Seattle has done a masterful job of building that defense, and I would love for us to be able to accumulate that kind of talent on that side of the ball, but they seem to be more the exception than the rule these days.

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