Defense wins championships - Alabama's defensive performances in the Poll Era

I decided to go down a research rabbit hole and look back at our national championship teams dating back to 1961. In particular I wanted to focus on our team's defensive stats from those seasons to see how they performed year in and year out. As one would expect, the defense was dominant in a vast majority of cases:

1961
Total Defense: 132.6 YPG
Scoring Defense: 2.2 PPG

1964
Total Defense: 191 YPG
Scoring Defense: 6.7 PPG

1965
Total Defense: 232.7 YPG
Scoring Defense: 7.1 PPG

1973
Total Defense: 244.8 YPG
Scoring Defense: 8.1 PPG

1978
Total Defense: 309.2 YPG
Scoring Defense: 14.6 PPG

1979
Total Defense: 180 YPG
Scoring Defense: 5.3 PPG

1992
Total Defense: 194.16 YPG
Scoring Defense: 9.1 PPG

2009
Total Defense: 244.1 YPG
Scoring Defense: 11.7 PPG

2011
Total Defense: 183.6 YPG
Scoring Defense: 8.2 PPG

2012
Total Defense: 250 YPG
Scoring Defense: 10.9 PPG

2015
Total Defense: 276.3
Scoring Defense: 15.1 PPG

2017
Total Defense: 260.4 YPG
Scoring Defense: 11.9 PPG

2020
Total Defense: 352.2 YPG
Scoring Defense: 19.4 PPG


Takeaways

- Only two defenses in our long history of national championship teams gave up an average of more than 300 yards per game: 1978 and 2020.

- That 2011 defense was so statistically good for the era that it has become an outlier in the history of modern college football.

- That 1961 defense was on another freaking planet.