Chicago scored only 17.5 points per game in 2018, the 4th worst mark in the NFL. This was a significant drop from 2018, when they were 9th best in the NFL at 26.3 points per game. I’ve seen some people argue that this is mainly due to Chicago’s defense, which scored 5 fewer touchdowns and forced 17 fewer turnovers in 2019. The logic then was that the offense in 2018 was just as bad, but it was overshadowed by a dominant defense that handed them points on a regular basis.
This argument made me curious, so I dug into the numbers to see if it held up.
Non-Offensive Points
The 2018 Bears had 44 points that were scored by their defense and special teams, while the 2019 version had 16*. If you remove those from the season totals, the 2018 offense scored 277 points (23.6 per game) while the 2019 version scored 264 (16.5 per game).
That means Chicago’s offense scored 7.1 points per game more in 2018 than 2019. The total points scored dropped by 8.8 per game, so clearly the bulk of that was from offensive points, not defense/special teams.
*Quick disclaimer: I tallied touchdowns, field goals and safeties, and applied values of 7, 3, and 2, respectively, for each. These numbers might be a little off because not all touchdowns result in exactly 7 points due to missed extra points or going for 2.
Points Off Turnovers
Of course, points directly scored by the defense is only half of the original argument. The 2018 defense also forced far more turnovers, in theory setting the offense up in better field position for more easy points. In order to see what effect this had, I looked at points scored off turnovers for each team using Pro Football Reference’s Drive Finder. The table below shows the data.
Despite forcing far more turnovers, the Bears didn’t actually get many more points from them. Part of this may because of where the turnovers happened; the average starting field position for these drives was the Chicago 42 in 2018 and the opponent 47 in 2019. Accordingly, the Bears got 2.4 points per drive off turnovers in 2018 and 3.3 in 2019. Because of this, offensive scoring following a defensive turnover changed by only 0.7 points per game from 2018 to 2019.