Why Denver winning SB 50 means there's hope for the Eagles

Caution: hot take coming.

The Denver Broncos just won Super Bowl 50 with a record low 194 yards of total offense, and I say this is good news for the Eagles, along with every other poor–to-middling NFL team.

For quite a few years now, my guiding principle has been that you need great quarterbacking to win the Super Bowl. Look at the names of the winning QBs over the past decade plus: Manning, Brady, Rodgers, Brees, Roethlisberger, Wilson and Flacco. And whatever you think of Joe Flacco overall, the year he won it, he had one of the best playoff runs of any QB in NFL history.

A whole bunch of people were tweeting Sunday night about how defense wins championships. A couple of years ago, I might have rolled my eyes. For much of the 2000s, this simply wasn't true. The best that could be said of the Saints' defense, the year Brees won, was that they had a knack for coming up with timely turnovers. New Orleans had the No. 1 offense and the No. 25 defense in 2009.

Three years earlier, Peyton Manning won his first Super Bowl. The Indianapolis Colts fielded the No. 3 offense in the league that year, along with the No. 21 defense.

If you'd asked me then whether defense or dominant quarterbacking is a bigger factor in winning championships, I'd absolutely have gone for the quarterbacking.

But the game is always changing. The era I just finished citing was preceded by a brief period when QBs such as Trent Dilfer and Brad Johnson won Super Bowls for Baltimore and Tampa Bay teams that rode dominant defenses. Maybe, in a 2016 NFL that lacks a big crop of elite QBs heading into their primes, we're headed back in that direction.

Why would that be good news for the Eagles (and the Redskins, and a lot of teams)? Because a great quarterback is harder to conjure up than a great defense. The Eagles just hired a highly regarded defensive coordinator, in Jim Schwartz. They're going back to a 4-3 setup that should maximize their considerable talent up front, led by Fletcher Cox, one of the NFL's truly elite d-linemen. No, they aren't on the level of Denver defensively – but neither was Denver, a couple years ago, when the Broncos got blown out of the Super Bowl by the Seahawks.

You can build a great defense, without "tanking" for a high pick – an absurd notion in the NFL anyway.

To anyone who says you can't win a Super Bowl with Sam Bradford at the helm, I would offer in rebuttal Peyton Manning's 2015 season. Not his career, certainly, but his 2015 season.

Manning's passer rating was 67.9, as Paul Domowitch pointed out in Monday's Daily News. He was the NFL's 35^th-ranked passer, and he didn't light it up in the postseason, either. Most of the second half Sunday night, Gary Kubiak seemed terrified Manning might do something to lose the game. Manning attempted seven passes after halftime.

Manning turned the ball over twice and didn't throw a touchdown pass. I'm pretty sure you could have tossed Bradford in there, instead of Manning, with Denver's defense and special teams edge, and the Broncos still would have won. The Panthers couldn't run, couldn't protect their quarterback, and couldn't win. (Of course, there might lie a pretty significant issue for the Eagles, as well, but good o-linemen also are easier to find than franchise QBs.)

For a while, rules changes and a great group of QBs seemed to make the NFL an offensive league, a quarterback's league. Not sure that's where we are today  – especially in an era when the league seems determined to take away big catches through overscrutiny on HD replay. (Anybody ever remember watching Lynn Swann's acrobatic catches in the '70s and wondering if the ball "moved"? Jerry Rice? Randy Moss? This requirement that the ball remain frozen like a paused video while a receiver rolls and tumbles is a recently conceived absurdity that does nothing to make the game better.)

But until the league makes more changes to free up offenses again, the Seahawks  of two years ago and this year's Broncos seem to herald a rebirth of defense-first title teams. That might make for a boring-looking product, but it ought to give many teams hope. Even this city's team.