Sounds boring, but defense is the name of the game

There is nothing more entertaining than watching a football game that features two teams combining to score almost 100 points.

That's why I enjoyed watching so many Kansas City Chiefs games this season. Often the Chiefs would score a few dozen points, their opponents would score a few dozen plus one, and the game was generally exciting from start to finish.

The same holds true in basketball. In the college game if you see two teams both break the 80-point barrier, the chances are the game was fun to watch.

In the NBA (if I still watched the NBA) it was fun to see two teams score 120 points each.

That hasn't really happened since the 1980s before the game was prostituted out to three-point shooting, one-handed dunking, posse possessing, immature adolescents.

But it was fun to watch the old Phoenix Suns and Dallas Mavericks, two teams with great offenses and no defenses, go at each other during the Magic-Bird prime.

Baseball is no different. Chicks dig the long ball and everyone can enjoy an 11-9 game assuming there were not six errors committed during the process.

It's too bad that all the scoring in the world means nothing. Or at least very little. If you look at all the championship teams in recent memory, it was not their ability to score that necessarily won them the title, it was their ability to stop other teams from scoring.

Ask any good coach in any sport and they will tell you that it is defense that wins.

Look at the NFL. The New England Patriots have won two of the past three NFL championships and are closing in on another.

What makes them good? Sure their offense is very solid, but it is the defense that everyone knows that makes them one of the best in the league.

Look at the other three teams still alive in the playoffs. They all have one common denominator. Atlanta Falcons -- good defense; Philadelphia Eagles -- good defense; Pittsburgh Steelers -- good defense.

Every year the Super Bowl winning team had one of the top defenses in the league.

Some people point to the St. Louis Rams and their title four years ago as evidence to the contrary. "The greatest show on turf" was the title of their offense and everyone knows how good those Marshall Faulk-Kurt Warner in their prime led teams were.

Nobody remembers that in 2000 the St. Louis Rams had the fifth-ranked defense in the league.

In basketball the Detroit Pistons last season were a great defensive team. They ranked first in the NBA in scoring defense and it led them to the NBA championship.

The year before that it was the San Antonio Spurs. They were ranked third in scoring defense.

Before that it was the Los Angeles Lakers. Sure they were scoring in bunches with Kobe and Shaq, but it was their defense that made the championships happen.

Sure the stats say defense is important, but what about defense makes the difference.

In a game where scoring the most points wins, doesn't it sound odd that the teams that score at the highest rate aren't necessarily victorious?

The best way to put it might be the way Lou Henson tells it to his players at New Mexico State University.

"Defense is something you can always control," Henson says. "In basketball, sometimes you'll be making your shots, sometimes you won't. But if you always play good defense, you will be in every game."

Maybe that is why you see John McNeley going to great lengths to make his team a better defensive ballclub.

For much of the season he was trying zone defenses. He was worried that athletically Nevada might not match up with some of the teams they were playing and that it would hurt Nevada defensively because of a mismatch or two.

But after getting handled by Webb City recently McNeley decided to give man-to-man defense a try. It was the defense he used to run primarily and it is a defense that if run right, can frustrate opponents.

Even though he feared that opponents might make Nevada pay, he put the onus on his players and they have responded. Two consecutive Southwest Conference wins later, and the Tigers are right back in the conference hunt. The reason -- defense.

Brent Bartlett likes to change up defenses when playing opponents. His philosophy is that if the other team can't predict what you're going to do, it's hard to figure out a way to beat it.

The bottom line is that he focuses on the defensive end of the ball, knowing that the Lady Tigers will need to be good there to have a chance at making it out of the district.

Defense wins championships. It may not be the most exciting aspect of sports, but it is the most important.