Randy Hollis: Offense, not defense, will win this year's NFL title

Three teams, it seems, have the best shot at winning this year's Super Bowl.

And with sincere apologies to fans of each of the following nine franchises, none of the teams that will take home the 2012 National Football League championship are named the Bengals, Broncos, Texans, Steelers, Ravens, Falcons, Giants, Lions or 49ers.

Nope, when it comes right down to it, this year's NFL title chase looks strictly like a three-horse race: the defending champion Green Bay Packers, the three-time Super Bowl champ New England Patriots, or the New Orleans Saints, who claimed the crown two years ago.

Those are your true title contenders; the rest of those playoff hopefuls are all just pretenders.

Now, predicting which one of our three favorites is going to go on and win it all is a real crapshoot, especially because all three of them defy that age-old axiom that defense wins championships.

You see, defense is simply something that the Packers, Patriots and Saints try to do — and often do pretty poorly — when their offense doesn't have the ball and is busy lighting up the scoreboard.

Indeed, instead of being defensive-minded teams that make it tough for their opponents to score, like most Super Bowl champions have been in the past, our top trio of title hopefuls simply pile up the points and hope that, at the end of the day, they've got more of them than their opponents.

They usually do.

And they all have one common denominator, as you might expect — a truly outstanding quarterback.

Green Bay lost only once all year long in a stellar 15-1 season which featured another superb performance by quarterback Aaron Rodgers, last year's Super Bowl Most Valuable Player and a strong candidate for league MVP honors this year. Rodgers threw for 4,643 yards and 45 touchdowns — great numbers, for sure, but somebody else's stats were even better.

New Orleans quarterback Drew Brees, who was the Super Bowl MVP in 2010, threw for an NFL-record 5,476 yards and 46 touchdowns this season. His yardage total shattered the previous single-season mark of 5,084 yards passing set by Miami's Dan Marino back in 1984.

New England, of course, has pretty-boy QB Tom Brady at the controls of its offense, and the three-time Super Bowl winner has racked up another stellar statistical season — 5,235 yards passing (which also surpassed Marino's 27-year-old record) and 39 touchdowns.