I am not at all sure why the Joomla programmers decided to default a new article creation status to published. Presumably to save time for those that create an article in one sitting. Since I seldom ever do this, it wastes my time. Below is the fix but keep in mind this may change with Joomla updates. If so you'll have to change it back again. Thus, the reason I created this page. I got tired of hunting for it on the Joomla forums after every update.

Open this file:

/administrator/components/com_content/models/forms/article.xml

Change default="1" to default="0" like the example below.

   <field name="state" type="list" label="JSTATUS"
            description="JFIELD_PUBLISHED_DESC" class="chzn-color-state"
            filter="intval" size="1" default="0"

Save the file. You're done.