So, Who is the Worst Team in the NFL?

Posted byAdam FryerPosted inUncategorized

There comes a point in the season for most fans where they pause and realize “Man, this team I root for just isn’t good enough to win the Super Bowl this year.” It will happen at different points for every fanbase, and maybe the realization won’t even strike all at once. The simple fact of the matter is that, unless you have the fortune of cheering for one of the best teams in the league, at some point you’ll need to come to terms that you are spending your weekends watching a football team that almost certainly won’t win anything of consequence, and that that’s alright.

Some fans, though, need to have a more dire conversation with themselves. They might, during the darkest depths of the season, come to realize that their favorite squad just might be the very worst in the NFL. Fortunately for most, there can only be one team that is truly the best at being the worst, and I’m determined to find out who that is. There are several teams that could all fit the bill, but with such a plethora of pathetic teams, how do I begin to whittle them down?

To begin, we need some baseline criteria to get a starting group. I think using the last-place team in each division is a good start, but we should expand from there. To expand our field a bit, and not exclude some teams that deserve consideration here, I will also be including teams that are currently tied for last place in their division. It’s hardly a perfect solution, but this isn’t rocket science, so “good enough” is good enough for me here. There are 8 divisions, and two teams are sharing the cellar in 2 of them. That leaves us with a group of 10 to start our search with. Say hello to our competitors:

  • The New England Patriots (1-4, 4th in the AFC East)
  • The Denver Broncos (1-5, 4th in the AFC West)
  • The Cincinnati Bengals (2-3, 4th in the AFC North)
  • The Houston Texans (2-3, t-4th in the AFC South)
  • The Tennessee Titans (2-3, t-4th in the AFC South)
  • The New York Giants (1-4, 4th in the NFC East)
  • The Chicago Bears (1-4, t-4th in the NFC North)
  • The Minnesota Vikings (1-4, t-4th in the NFC North)
  • The Arizona Cardinals (1-4, 4th in the NFC West)
  • The Carolina Panthers (0-5, 4th in the NFC South)

Isn’t it beautiful? There’s teams of every type here. Scrappy upstarts still fighting to earn respect, powerhouses stumbling out of the blocks, underdogs who are happy just to have a win or two; there’s something for everybody. They’re all unique, and they all have a story to tell, but only one of them can well and truly be the dredge of the league. Let’s start narrowing them down until, at long last, only the truly worst team remains, the singularity of suckiness in the NFL. 

IS ONE OF THESE TEAMS ACTUALLY GOOD?

I think a wise first move is to review our list and see what teams stand out to us as outliers in a good sense. Is there one team, or perhaps more than one team, that despite their poor start is clearly a step above the rest? One that, despite their early misgivings, has realistic playoff hopes? I think so.

The Cincinnati Bengals must be getting sick of starting their seasons like this. Joe Burrow has famously stated that the Bengals Super Bowl window is open so long as he is with the team, and while that’s big talk, he’s backed those words up with results. Outside of his 2020 rookie year in which he only played 10 games, the Bengals have advanced to the AFC Championship Game once, and made it to the Super Bowl in his other season. Joe Burrow, and the injection of talent around him, have unquestionably turned the Bengals into one of the NFL’s elite programs. 

That notion seemed to be in trouble after the Bengals started 0-2 this year, marking the third time they’ve reached that mark in the last four seasons. Burrow’s calf injury that had been lingering since training camp didn’t seem to be getting better, and the offense suffered greatly for it. The Bengals had just barely over 300 yards through the air on over 70 pass attempts, and 141 total rushing yards. So why do I feel like they deserve to be the first team to be dismissed in my search for football’s worst squad? Because I have faith they’ll turn it around, and I’m so certain of it because they’ve already begun. Just this last weekend, the Bengals offense seemed to be finally coming to its senses. Burrow looked mostly healthy and had easily his best game of the year. He tallied season bests in yards, completions, passing touchdowns, bad throw percentage, and also faced the fewest pressures he’s seen all year. Sure, it was against the Cardinals (we’ll get to them…), but it was a marked improvement over their performance against a not-much-better Rams defense only two weeks before.

So, if you wanted to take all that and compress it into only a sentence, you could say “the Bengals have been easily the best of these other teams on our list in recent seasons, and I have confidence they will be once again when the season ends.” With all that in mind, they are officially the first team off our list, and unofficially our “bad, but not that bad” team of the early 2023 season.

Our list now sits at the following 9 teams:

  • The New England Patriots (1-4, 4th in the AFC East)
  • The Denver Broncos (1-5, 4th in the AFC West)
  • The Houston Texans (2-3, t-4th in the AFC South)
  • The Tennessee Titans (2-3, t-4th in the AFC South)
  • The New York Giants (1-4, 4th in the NFC East)
  • The Chicago Bears (1-4, t-4th in the NFC North)
  • The Minnesota Vikings (1-4, t-4th in the NFC North)
  • The Arizona Cardinals (1-4, 4th in the NFC West)
  • The Carolina Panthers (0-5, 4th in the NFC South)

GOOD PLAYERS, BAD TEAMS

Football is much like baseball in that outside of one position, there’s not much one player can do to win games outright. In the NFL, it simply isn’t possible to add a LeBron-tier talent to your roster and evolve from a bottom-dweller to a contending squad immediately off their efforts alone. Extraordinary talented players are stuck on awful teams every year, and of course 2023 is no exception. I think that if we can decide that one of these squads, even with their poor start, has one of the league’s true difference-makers on the payroll, we can reasonably remove them from our list. I propose that the Minnesota Vikings fit the bill.

The “talent” that I refer to is mostly concentrated in one player in particular on this roster: Justin Jefferson. The NFL superstar by day, dance trend-setter by night might be the single most supremely talented player in the sport, and is single-handedly making the Vikings cool in spite of the swagger black hole that plays quarterback for them (I don’t care how many big chains he wears or funny nicknames he gets, Kirk Cousins is profoundly lame). 

I would argue that simply having Jefferson on the roster, who is already poised to become one of the all-time greats of the position, excludes the Vikings from being the worst of the worst.

We are down to the following eight teams:

  • The New England Patriots (1-4, 4th in the AFC East)
  • The Denver Broncos (1-5, 4th in the AFC West)
  • The Houston Texans (2-3, t-4th in the AFC South)
  • The Tennessee Titans (2-3, t-4th in the AFC South)
  • The New York Giants (1-4, 4th in the NFC East)
  • The Chicago Bears (1-4, t-4th in the NFC North)
  • The Arizona Cardinals (1-4, 4th in the NFC West)
  • The Carolina Panthers (0-5, 4th in the NFC South)

REMARKABLE ROOKIES

Being a rookie in the NFL is no cakewalk. All your life, you’ve probably been the best player on every team you’ve been on, until one day you join the NFL, and now you are expected to compete with and against grown men who have dedicated their lives to playing the sport at the highest level. It goes from being a fun thing you do after class to your full-time profession, and suddenly billions of dollars in resources are being funneled into ensuring you and your team are successful. It’d be a drastic enough shift to falter anybody, but some rookies rise above it all and immediately make enormous contributions to their teams. Is there a team out there who, despite a shoddy start, has some newbies who are sure to lead their team down the right path? If there is, it’s definitely the Houston Texans.

It may sound like an absurd thing to say about a player drafted second overall, but a lot of mud has been slung at CJ Stroud over the last year. Even before he was selected by Houston, he was berated for an allegedly low S2 score, a test which attempts to measure mental processing speed, and was dismissed as just another Ohio State flameout at quarterback. He was just a consolation prize for whoever was unfortunate enough to have to take the 2nd pick at the 2023 Draft and have to play in the shadow of the highly-touted Bryce Young. When Houston won their Week 18 game and lost all hope of securing the top pick, fans admonished coach Lovie Smith as winning just to spite the team that was about to fire him.

I’d bet any amount that Stroud heard all this, but you’d never know it based on his play. Just last week, Stroud set the NFL record for most passes to start a career without an interception. This isn’t because he’s dinking and dunking screen passes and short little out routes, either. He is 11th in intended air yards per pass attempt, implying that he is on average throwing farther down the field than most other passers are. By just about any counting stat you can find, Stroud is already one of the most prolific passers in the league. He’s currently third in passing yards, ninth in completions, and tenth in passing touchdowns. He might not even be the best rookie on the roster, however.

Houston was pretty soundly criticized for paying the huge ransom they did in order to move up and grab the 3rd overall pick in last year’s draft and secure two of the top three selections. That criticism seemed awfully hasty to me, and now we can see why. The Texans selected Will Anderson Jr with that pick, and by just about any measure that matters, he’s already among the very best pass rushers in football. Despite being one of the most double-teamed edge rushers in the league (only Nick Bosa, Myles Garrett, and Micah Parsons are doubled-up on at a higher rate), he is one of the most efficient pass rushers in the game. According to ESPN, Anderson sports a 29% pass-rush win rate, tied with Garrett for 4th best in football. He’s being mentioned in the same breath as players who are perennial All-Pro candidates and get regular Hall of Fame hype. He plays like a guy with five Pro Bowl selections  under his belt, not five games.

Seven teams remain:

  • The New England Patriots (1-4, 4th in the AFC East)
  • The Denver Broncos (1-5, 4th in the AFC West)
  • The Tennessee Titans (2-3, t-4th in the AFC South)
  • The New York Giants (1-4, 4th in the NFC East)
  • The Chicago Bears (1-4, t-4th in the NFC North)
  • The Arizona Cardinals (1-4, 4th in the NFC West)
  • The Carolina Panthers (0-5, 4th in the NFC South)

NOWHERE TO GO BUT UP

Not every team can have a great start to the season. It isn’t always an easy thing to distinguish a truly awful team from a team that’s just playing poorly, but we’ll have to try to make that distinction here. There’s one team here that has been truly dreadful to start the season, but has shown some evidence recently that things might be on the up-and-up. They might not be among the best in the NFL, but also maybe not the worst. This team, I believe, is the Chicago Bears.

After the first three weeks of the season, I probably would have put the Bears in dead last in a hypothetical power rankings list. They had started their 2023 by getting dominated by the Packers at home, then losing to an average-at-best Tampa team before a nationally-televised beatdown at the hands of the Chiefs. Justin Fields, who you could succinctly say was likely in his final “prove it” year before the Bears might decide to resume their search for the franchise’s quarterback of the future, was horrible, culminating in an 11-for-22 performance with 99 total yards through the air against Kansas City. The 2023 season was dead in the water, and Bears fans had decided that going for a walk or picking up a new hobby might be a better use of their weekends than watching football.

Then, suddenly, things turned around. Before their Week 4 game against the Broncos, Justin Fields made a remark that was widely interpreted as a shot at the coaching staff when he said that he thought that coaching was partly to blame for his poor play, and that he needed to “play free.” He was widely panned for this, but it turns out it might just have been the truth. Since then, The Bears choked away a late lead against the Broncos (which isn’t much to be proud of, but almost winning was a step up from what the Bears had been doing up to that point) and then, with the whole country watching, smoked Washington on Thursday Night Football by a score of 40-20. Fields has suddenly become a serious passing threat, which previously was by far the weakest facet of this game. In their last two matches, Field has completed over 67% of his passes for 617 yards and 8 passing touchdowns to only one interception.

Again, I’ll make clear that I don’t think that the Bears have a total reversal of fortunes in their future. By DVOA, they are 31st defensively and 24th offensively. Considering that they have both their and Carolina’s first round pick next draft, they very well may end up picking twice in the top five selections. What I do believe, however, is that there is hope that Chicago can at least become a step or two above the truly vile teams we have to sift through today. 

Speaking of which, our remaining six teams are as such:

  • The New England Patriots (1-4, 4th in the AFC East)
  • The Denver Broncos (1-5, 4th in the AFC West)
  • The Tennessee Titans (2-3, t-4th in the AFC South)
  • The New York Giants (1-4, 4th in the NFC East)
  • The Arizona Cardinals (1-4, 4th in the NFC West)
  • The Carolina Panthers (0-5, 4th in the NFC South)

ADAM, YOU ARE BAD AT STATISTICS

During my time at college, I took a lot of statistics and economics classes. In these courses, one of the key lessons my professors would lay on us time and time again was the importance of wisely selecting and understanding your sample group. When examining a population, you must understand how your selection process might impact the results you see. They would likely not approve of me trying to examine an entire cross-section of the NFL by just picking the worst team in each division and trying to glean any meaningful observations from them. By doing this, I run the risk of including a team in this study that isn’t really that bad, but just stuck at the bottom of a pretty decent division. This unfortunate squad is the Tennessee Titans.

I definitely didn’t see this coming, but the AFC South is shaping up to be a formidable division. I figured the Jags would walk away with this division and be looking to lock up favorable playoff seeding by the time December rolled around, but things aren’t turning out to be quite that simple. 

Jacksonville, even though I still think they are quite good, need to figure themselves out. A 2-0 stretch during their London residency has saved their hides for now, but they need to get their footing under them quick, as they have 3 divisional games and a meeting with the 49ers in their next six matches. Houston, as I discussed above, is a team on the rise with newly-acquired franchise cornerstones on both sides of the ball leading the way. Indianapolis has one of the best defensive lines in football and one of the most electrifying young play-makers in football in Anthony Richardson quarterbacking the offense (whenever he’s healthy). That leaves Tennessee.

I’m going to be brief with this section because, if truth be told, I don’t find the Titans very interesting. They aren’t particularly good on either end of the ball while also not being bad on either end of the ball, they don’t play a particularly fun style of football, and Ryan Tannehill is too good to be amusing, but not good enough as to inspire awe. They are an utterly mediocre team in a division of teams that are a step above them. They trade away most of their best players. They refuse to be bad and rebuild while also refusing to be any good at all.They’re nothing special, but they are in no way one of the worst teams in football. Let’s get them out of here and move on.

We’ve got five teams left to discuss:

  • The New England Patriots (1-4, 4th in the AFC East)
  • The Denver Broncos (1-5, 4th in the AFC West)
  • The New York Giants (1-4, 4th in the NFC East)
  • The Arizona Cardinals (1-4, 4th in the NFC West)
  • The Carolina Panthers (0-5, 4th in the NFC South)

GIANT KILLERS, BUT NOT GIANTS KILLERS

It’s easy for a team to lose the will to fight if a season goes downhill too quickly. Of course they’d never admit such a thing, but every now and then you’ll tune in to some 2-7 team being walloped by some playoff-bound squad, and you can tell this public embarrassment really isn’t bugging them too much. They’re getting paid just the same win or lose, and in a few short weeks, they’ll be vacationing somewhere tropical and can put the toils of a lost NFL season behind them. Some teams though, as the youths say, have that dog in ‘em. They’re scrappy, they get up when they’re knocked down, and they’re not afraid of you. If two equally bad teams face off, but one of them plays like they want to be there, I’ll pick them every time. I think you could describe the Arizona Cardinals this way.

The Cardinals, in a word, are feisty. They turned a Dallas defense that was the talk of the town into mincemeat in Week Three, rampaging over the Cowboys for 222 yards on the ground en route to a huge upset win. The very next week, they played the 49ers close when a Michael Wilson receiving touchdown late in the third quarter cut San Fran’s lead down to a mere 5 points. That was the closest the game would get, but there was suddenly a real possibility that Arizona, everybody’s preseason pick to be the worst team in football, might best the NFC’s cream of the crop squads in back-to-back weeks. Any team that has the possibility to bring sweat to the brows of the NFL’s premier units on any given week is one that has a little fire in them. These Cardinals are willing to go toe-to-toe with anybody, and I respect that.

Now, the obvious argument against this is that these Cardinals lost to the Giants, who are still on this list, after letting a 21-point lead evaporate in the 2nd half. If we have direct evidence that the Giants are better than the Cardinals, how can we so confidently take Arizona out of contention before the Giants, you may wonder? For one, I object that beating a team once suddenly means you are the superior group. Is Arizona better than Dallas? Is Green Bay better than New Orleans? Additionally, I think the Giants being 21 points behind the Cardinals is as much an indication of the type of team theGiants are as much as it is the Cardinals for giving it up.

We’re down to our final four teams:

  • The New England Patriots (1-4, 4th in the AFC East)
  • The Denver Broncos (1-5, 4th in the AFC West)
  • The New York Giants (1-4, 4th in the NFC East)
  • The Carolina Panthers (0-5, 4th in the NFC South)

A HALF-GOOD TEAM IS STILL A BAD TEAM

When you’ve stripped the league down to its barest studs and are left with the truly awful squads, you’ve got to start to really stretch to differentiate them. Fortunately, I don’t think we have to dive too deep quite yet. There is still one team that you can make a reasonable argument for to keep out of the basement, and it’s the New England Patriots.

There are teams that are utterly helpless on both ends of the ball in the NFL, and of the four teams that remain, two of them are unquestionably teams so lacking in footholds. New England, for as quickly they’ve plummeted to the dredges of the NFL, still isn’t quite so utterly hopeless. Sure, they might have the worst offense in the league, rank 32nd in DVOA on special teams, and have Bill Belichick still refusing to loosen his grip on the GM position, but they do have something they can hang their hats on; their defense is still alright.

This has been a staple of Bill Belichick teams for ages. From about 2009 onwards, the Patriots have nearly always been above average in terms of yardage allowed to opposing offenses. In fact, since 2018, the only time the Patriots were outside the top ten in yardage allowed was the 2020 season, when I’m pretty sure something else was happening in the world that minimized the amount of time players could receive in-person coaching. This season doesn’t seem to be an exception to the rule. Through Week Six, the Patriots are 14th in defensive DVOA, which is better than any of the other teams rated on either offense or defense. One of them did come close to being similarly half-competent though, and that’s the Denver Broncos.

In 2022, the Broncos defense did everything they could to keep a team with a non-functioning offense afloat. Despite being on the field more often than most teams (Denver’s Time of Possession in 2022 was 19th best in the league), the Broncos were up to the task, allowing the 7th fewest yards in the NFL. The script has flipped in 2023. As if exhausted from the effort, the Denver defense has collapsed into a scrapheap, now sporting easily the worst defense by EPA in the league. They are still easily the statistical outlier in this category after markedly improving their standing by holding the Chiefs to only 18 points. The offense, just in time for it to not matter at all, has finally started to right the ship. The offensive line has been stellar (they are the tenth and third best in terms of pass-block and run-block win rate, respectively), Russell Wilson is playing better this season even if he is a shadow of his former self, and the unit as a whole is putting up utterly average numbers of both yards per game (21st) and points per game (17th). 

Of course, a half-atrocious, half-mediocre team adds up to one pretty bad squad, but having one side of your ball playing something that resembles football at the professional level is a step above what the unfortunate loser/winner of our search can boast.

It’s come to this. Our final two teams are:

  • The New York Giants (1-4, 4th in the NFC East)
  • The Carolina Panthers (0-5, 4th in the NFC South)

AND OUR WINNER (READ: LOSER) IS…

We’ve finally come to the end of our search, and I’ve been thinking long and hard about this decision. I’ve had a sneaking suspicion that it would almost certainly come down to these two from the jump, and even with all that time to roll this around in my noggin, I’m on the fence. You, lucky reader, are essentially going to see my mental process in real-time.

In one corner, Carolina has yet to win a game, has a shocking lack of star players, and has failed spectacularly in setting up Bryce Young for success. Similarly, New York has only managed to barely scrape out a comeback win over another team lacking most things that make a team good, has been embarrassed on the national stage, and has an offense that completely disappears for games at a time.

One thing, though, immediately sticks out in my mind as a partition in this murky swamp of trash-tier football, a shining beacon that someday soon, one of these teams might be good again; optimism at quarterback. Forgive me if this sounds a little juvenile, but I think teams, even if for no reason other than learned instinct, lean on the teams starting quarterback when times are hard. They’re the banner-carriers of the franchise, and if they are lost, hope can be safely abandoned more often than not. 

So, with this in mind, I think we can put the Carolina Panthers above the Giants. The Giants offense, with the newly-paid Daniel Jones at the helm, is a morabund unit any way you slice it. They haven’t scored an offensive touchdown in 3 entire games. They are 32nd in offensive DVOA. Their 12.1 points scored per game are easily the fewest of any team in football. They have the fourth fewest passing yards per game, ahead of only Tennessee (who has the fewest passing attempts in the league), Cleveland, and the Jets (who have both been playing backup quarterbacks for a significant amount of time this season). 

Sure, the Panthers might not much better in these regards, but I would say that best case scenario for what Bryce Young, a 1st overall pick only a half-dozen games into his career, is much better than that of Daniel Jones, a now five-year vet whose lone playoff win came last year after barely scraping by a Minnesota team that might have missed the playoffs entirely if it hadn’t had the immense fortune of being on the receiving end of its own great fortune.

I’ll put it this way; if Jones and Young switched teams, who would come out better? The Giants offense isn’t exactly stacked, but it’s more than Young has to work with. Saquon Barkely is one of the league’s elite running backs once he gets rolling, and their wide receiver group, while not having a star amongst them, is better than the Adam Thielen-led group in Carolina. To put a fine point on it all, I think Carolina has more potential for greatness at the sport’s most important position that the Giants. This might be some flimsy reasoning, but when you get this far down the line, it’s hard to do much better.

So, that leaves the New York Giants. Let’s run through the previous criteria and make sure we didn’t slip up and keep them around when they should have gotten off at another stop. Are the Giants secretly actually good? No. Do they have one of the best players in the leauge on their roster? I’d argue not. Are they showing improvement week after week? Definitely not. Do they have some outstanding rookies who can mold the Giants into a winning culture sooner rather than later? Nope. Have they pulled off a notable upset win? They haven’t. Are they just some poor saps stuck on the bottom of a good division? Even if they were, it wouldn’t change how bad they are. They don’t even have one good half of their team.