Using the college game as this is the "closest" you can get with the NFL playoff rules.
Premise is whether getting the ball second or choosing "defense first" results in more victories.
The answer so far seems to be no.
[
www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov]
Scroll down to Table 2 and Table 3.
Table 2: out of 240 or so college overtime games, 51% of the time the game went to the side that chose defense first.
Table 3: even more important: 71 out of 151 Overtime games that ended after 1 OT... 47% of the time, the team that chose "defense first" won.
This means that it is almost a coin flip if you decide to get the ball second or not.
So while everyone here has made logical points as to why you should get the ball second.. the data so far does not back it up.
Granted, college is different, but this is the closest you can get and the logic used is roughly similar.
Pro- you don't know. You aren't going to start at the 25. You have better FG kickers. There is no sample size. So if you are just relying on logic, then the data right now doesn't convincingly prove one choice is better than the other.
