Does Defence Win Championships? Not in College Lacrosse

Sports fans love cliches. There is no greater example than “defence wins championships.”

One of the oldest and most established ideas in sports, it is accepted as truth. And there are many examples of this being as such. In football, the 2000 Ravens, 2002 Buccaneers, 2003 Patriots, 2008 Steelers, 2013 Seahawks and 2016 Seahawks all won the Super Bowl with the number one defence in the NFL. In that time, only the 2009 Saints and 2022 Chiefs won with the number one offence. 

So surely, that same idea must be true in College Lacrosse. Defence wins championships… right? 

Not exactly. 

I looked at NCAA ranking summaries going back to 2010 (as far as they go) to determine whether dominant defences or dominant offences win more national championships. Check out the ranking summaries here if you are curious. I took the Final Four participants from each season, so the data includes 52 teams. 

My idea was not to look at the actual statistics (i.e number of goals per game) but to instead examine the national rank of each team by statistic. The full dataset is available below. Or here. 

The most significant finding is that over the last 15 years, scoring offence is a much more significant predictor of a Final Four appearance and National Championship than scoring defence. 

The average rank of scoring defence amongst Final Four participants over this span was 18.85, meaning that the average defence was 18th best in the country. The average offence over that same time span was 10.88. 

This is even more glaring when filtering for national champions. The lowest offensive rank of any National Champion was the 2017 Maryland Terrapins, who had the 10th best offence. 

Defensively, both the 2016 UNC Tar Heels and the 2021 Virginia Cavaliers finished with the 40th best defence in the nation. The 2011 Cavaliers finished 37th in scoring defence, while Duke’s back to back championship seasons in 2013 and 2014 finished at 30th and 27th respectively in scoring defence. 

Of the 13 national champions in this dataset, only four finished in the top ten in scoring defence. Again, 10th was the worst ranking in the offensive column. 

Last year’s Notre Dame team was the only team to win the national championship with the nation’s best scoring defence (and also the only team to finish first in both offence and defence). The 2022 Maryland Terrapins finished fourth in defence, while Loyola finished fifth in 2012 and Notre Dame finished sixth in 2023. 

Offence also seems to be the specific separator between the champions and other Final Four participants. The average defensive rank was relatively similar between the champions, the finalists, and the semi-finalists. 

But the offensive differences were more significant.

Finish	Average Scoring Offence Rank	Average Scoring Defence Rank
National Champion	4.31	9.44
Finalist	16.08	9.22
Semi-Finalist	13.35	9.50

Obviously scoring statistics can be messy and heavily related to strength of schedule, pace, and other variables. And I only received a hard-earned “B” grade in my only statistics course in college, so an expert I am not. But the stats clearly suggest that a dominant offence is more important than a dominant defence.

Outliers 

Of all the major statistics, scoring offence was the lowest average rank and therefore the most significant predictor of success. The average rank for faceoffs was 21.61, while riding and clearing had less of an impact as well. Ground balls per game rank had an average of 18, but that statistic is muddied by its relation to the faceoff game. Special teams has a bizarre impact (more on that later). 

But just for fun, let’s look at some historical outliers. The lowest ranked defence to make it to the Final Four was the 2023 Virginia Cavaliers, who finished 43rd in scoring defence. They led the nation however in scoring offence and shooting percentage. 

After the aforementioned UNC and UVA champions, the next lowest defence was the 2015 Johns Hopkins Blue Jays who finished 39th in scoring D. The 2011 Cavaliers, 2019 Yale Bulldogs, and 2024 Cavaliers all finished 37th. 

On offence, the lowest ranked unit in the Final Four was the 2012 Notre Dame Fighting Irish, who had the 47th ranked offence. They scored just 8.63 goals per game, but allowed an incredible 6.31. That gives them both the lowest goals per game of any team in the data AND the lowest goals against. They eventually lost to Loyola in the semi finals by a score of 7-5. That may be the Sicko Team of the Century so far. 

The next lowest were the 2017 Towson Tigers, who made the semifinals with the 46th best offence and 4th defence. That was the same offensive rank as both the 2024 Maryland Terrapins and 2024 Denver Pioneers. 

Last year’s Terps were the most improbable Final Four teams in memory. They finished with the 46th best offence and 17th best defence. Their cumulative rank of 63 (46+17) was the highest of any team in the data. They did rank second in faceoffs but it’s hard to overstate how remarkable that run was from Coach Tillman and his team. 

Special Teams, Special Players?

Arguably the most remarkable finding in this data was that Final Four teams have been outright horrible on penalty kill. I have legitimately no reasonable theories to describe this trend. 

Last year, the Denver Pioneers had the best penalty kill unit in the country. The other teams ranked 64th (Notre Dame), 69th (Maryland) and 71st (Virginia)! The only two teams in the country with a worse penalty kill were Merrimack and Hofstra. 

Keep in mind that the Irish had the best defence (which includes penalty kill situations) and the 64th best penalty kill unit. Wild. 

Historically that was not a total outlier. The average penalty kill rank of Final Four teams is 35.88, easily the highest of any statistic. In total, 16 of the 52 teams in the data finished 50th or worse in penalty kill defence! Only seven finished in the top ten!

Again, offence was more important here. Teams in the data finished an average of 18th in man-up offence. Teams finished in the top ten 19 times in that span, and the number one powerplay in the country made the Final Four four times (2011 Cavaliers, 2019 Penn State, 2015 Denver, and 2024 Notre Dame). 

Sometimes it just doesn’t make sense. The 2021 Cavaliers finished third in scoring offence and 37th in powerplay. Who knows. 

Shot Clock Era 

While the focus here is on rank, I did want to highlight some brief outliers from the actual data. Most notably, scoring is way up in the shot-clock era, there is no doubt about it. 

In 2012, Notre Dame held teams to 6.31 goals. In 2024, they again had the best defence in the country, but allowed 8.94 per game, more than 2 full goals more. In 2012, 8.94 would have been the 15th best defence in the country. 

On offence, the Irish scored 15.65 goals per game. Let’s compare that to the 2011 Cavaliers who won the title and finished third in scoring offence with 12.56 goals per contest. That number would have finished 26th in 2024. 

Again, this is not surprising, but it is worth noting how significant the trend really is. 

What surprised you? What didn’t? Let me know in the comments below. I hope to follow this article up with an analysis of the women’s game as well, so stay tuned for that. 

Until next time…