COLUMN: Productive defense will make CMU football a contender again

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The old sports saying ‘defense wins championships’ sometimes gets overlooked or forgotten, but it still reigns true.

In baseball, pitching is defense. Last year the San Francisco Giants won the World Series and it comes as no surprise that they lead the league with the lowest earned run average.

The Super Bowl champion Green Bay Packers had quarterback Aaron Rodgers take all the glory, and he deserved some with a stellar year, but the Packers still had the league’s second best scoring defense, led by Charles Woodson.

Defense leading to championships translates to Mid-American Conference football as well.

Last year the MAC championship game came down between the conference’s top scoring defense against the third best scoring defense. The top four defenses in the league finished in the top five in the standings.

Central Michigan finished seventh in the MAC for scoring defense and consequently finished ninth in the league.

Defense wins championships, and defense can lose championships.

For the Chippewas to climb back into MAC contention, the defense will need to step up. Losing linebackers Nick Bellore and Matt Berning, along with cornerback Vince Agnew to the National Football League won’t help matters.

This means safety Jahleel Addae, the returning leader in tackles, and others will have to fill a large void and make this team more well rounded. Last week, CM Life ran a story about the offense needing to be more balanced with a better rushing attack and this team needs better overall offensive-defensive balance to rack up wins.

Last season Miami University won the MAC title, scoring 22.8 points per game, good enough for seventh in the conference. The Chippewas offense finished eighth at 22.1 per game.

The offense wasn’t stellar, but they managed. The defense didn’t play champion caliber football.

In 2009 when CMU went 12-2 and won the MAC, everyone puts it on how well former CMU quarterback Dan LeFevour played. Obviously he was a great player and led the team offensively, but it still had the MAC’s best scoring defense to help aid it to the title, allowing only 17.1 points per game. That was three points better than any other team in the league that year.

Quarterback Ryan Radcliff and the supposedly up-and-coming run game should be exciting to watch and talk about this fall, but the games will be won and lost with defense.

If everything goes well, Radcliff and the offense can get all the glory during a nice MAC run just like Rodgers and LeFevour, did with their respective teams, but its going to be the defensive guys like Addae, senior linebacker Armond Staten and sophomore cornerback Avery Cunningham that will make the difference.