The most important stat in football (cont.)

PRD: The Fast Track To A Title

The top 25 tells us that winning the Passer Rating Differential battle is the fast track to winning a championship in pro football: 14 of the Top 25 teams won NFL championships or Super Bowls. Three others lost in the championship game.

Of the 71 champions since 1940, an incredible 26 of them -- 37 percent -- finished No. 1 in Passer Rating Differential; another 14 finished No. 2 in Passer Rating Differential. In other words, 56 percent of NFL champions were No. 1 or No. 2 in PRD.

The top 25 teams were near impossible to beat, with a combined record of 299-63-4 (.822). The average team in the Top 25 won 12 games and lost 2.5 games.

Among the 11 teams in our Top 25 that failed to win a championship, three were stopped by other PRD juggernauts.

The 1960 Browns (No. 1 on the list) were edged out for the Eastern Conference championship, and an appearance in the NFL title game, by Norm Van Brocklin, Chuck Bednarik and the 1960 Eagles (No. 19 on the list). If not for a 31-29 loss to Philadelphia in October, the Browns, not the Eagles, would have battled Vince Lombardi's Packers in the 1960 NFL championship game.

Ken Anderson 's 1975 Bengals are No. 9 on the list. They went 11-1 that year against teams not from Pittsburgh, but lost both meetings with the Steelers (No. 6 on the list). Pittsburgh finished one game ahead of Cincinnati in the AFC Central and ended the year with its second consecutive Super Bowl victory.

The 1963 Giants (No. 10) and Bears (No. 13) met in the NFL title game, a 14-10 Chicago victory (more on that epic below).

The Genius Of Bill Walsh

Every great "dynasty" (1960s Packers, 1970s Steelers, 1980s/90s 49ers, 2000s Patriots) and near-dynasty (1970s Cowboys, 1970s Vikings, 1990s Rams) of the era is represented on the list, except for the largely overrated Cowboys of the 1990s -- a group that went better than 12-4 just once.

But one dynasty loomed larger than the rest.

Three teams in the top seven belonged to Bill Walsh. This cluster of San Francisco teams proves that the great genius Walsh, as Cold, Hard Football Facts have noted, was not that he popularized the West Coast offense. No, the great genius of Walsh was that he popularized the West Coast offense while creating arguably the greatest (and certainly most underappreciated) defensive dynasty in history.

For 17 straight years, the 49ers never surrendered more than 300 points in a season and they consistently produced very low Defensive Passer Ratings, usually among the very best in the NFL. We discussed this phenomenon a couple years ago and more recently this spring, as it related to Ken Anderson's Hall of Fame cred.

The fact that three of the top seven teams all come from the same organization in the same brief period of success is amazing.

Let's put it into statistical context: the 49ers won five titles not because they had Joe Montana and Steve Young. The 49ers won five titles because they had Montana and Young and consistently paired these great passers with the best pass defenses in football.

The Undefeateds

Two teams since 1960 have produced unbeaten regular seasons: the 1972 Dolphins and 2007 Patriots. Both are on this list.

Miami famously rolled to a Super Bowl title without a single blemish. The hard-choking Patriots were upended by the Giants in what is the greatest statistical upset in NFL championship play of at least the past 65 years.

After all, the Giants not only shocked the only 16-0 team in NFL history and the most prolific offense ever -- they did it with a team that simply had no business winning a championship. New York's Passer Rating Differential of -10.4 in 2007 is easily the worst of any champion in NFL history. In fact, the 2007 Giants are one of just two teams in history to win a championship with a negative Passer Rating Differential. The other was the 1957 Lions (-4.5).

Brett Favre's Super Bowl Ring

You may have noticed Brett Favre's Super Bowl champion 1996 Packers are on the list. Even at the height of his powers in the mid-1990s, this greatest of all postseason liabilities needed to be paired with the NFL's No. 1 scoring defense to win a Super Bowl.

The 1996 Packers finished the year No. 1 in both Defensive Passer Rating and Passer Rating Differential. The Super Bowl champion 2010 Packers were also No. 1 in both Defensive Passer Rating and Passer Rating Differential.

Leave It To The Lions To Screw Up Statistical Greatness

The sad-sack Lions simply can do nothing right. Yes, we have high hopes for them in 2011. But the Lions can never be counted on to do anything right. After all, even when they field a statistical juggernaut of a team, they still can't win.

The 1976 Lions ranked No. 12 on the PRD Top 25. Yet those Lions, despite dominating the passing wars that year, somehow managed to stumble through a 6-8 season.

They're the only team in the Top 25 with a losing record. In fact, no other team in the Top 25 lost more than four games.

The Epic 1963 Title Game

Perhaps no game in history better exemplified the classic meeting of "irresistible force vs. immovable object" than the 1963 title game between the Bears and Giants.

New York was an offensive juggernaut led by Y.A. Tittle, who set a record with 36 touchdown passes. His mark would stand for 21 years, until broken by Dan Marino in 1984.

The 1963 Bears were -- and remain -- one of the greatest defenses in history. They surrendered just 144 points during a high-scoring year in which the No. 2 defense surrendered 206 points (Green Bay).

Both the 1963 Giants and Bears find themselves on the Top 25 Passer Rating Differential list: The Giants were propelled onto the list by an awesome-for-its-era 94.4 Offensive Passer Rating; the Bears leapt on to the list by virtue of an awesome-for-any-era 34.8 Defensive Passer Rating.

The game ultimately provided evidence for the "defense wins championships" crowd: The Bears won, 14-10, thanks to a defense that handed Tittle one of the most brutal beatings any quarterback has ever suffered. He threw five picks, was twice knocked out of the game, was hastily taped up on the sidelines and famously injected with more needles than a med-school lab dummy.

So Tittle was beaten badly. But the 1963 NFL title game -- like almost every title game in NFL history -- was a resounding triumph for the power of Passer Rating Differential.