Top 10 most disappointing teams
These teams didn't live up the hype, didn't take the next step or just were plain awful
Sean McCormick
Football Outsiders
ESPN Insider
Most NFL teams enter the season with big hopes, but for many, those hopes are unfulfilled. Sometimes, that team is coming off a Super Bowl run and trying to make it back to the big game; other times, a team that added the last couple of free-agent pieces, after a few years of near misses, is trying to make the jump. Either way, there have been teams with high expectations that ended up crashing and burning … or, perhaps worse, middling along with a frustrating 9-7 wild-card season when fans feel as though that championship season is so close yet so far away.
Here are our picks for the 10 most disappointing teams of the past 25 years.
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10. 1995 Cleveland Browns
Bill Belichick is known as a control freak, but his last year in Cleveland was derailed by something completely out of his control. The Browns were building on a 1994 playoff appearance and were a chic Super Bowl pick when they raced out to a 3-1 start. However, at midseason, Cleveland was sitting at 4-4 when the news broke that owner Art Modell was going to relocate the team to Baltimore. The Browns' offensive DVOA in the eight remaining games slid from 3.6 percent to minus-12.6 percent, and the defense's DVOA ballooned from 2.0 percent to 15.4 percent. (You can find an explanation of FO's defense-adjusted value over average metric here; remember that a higher defensive DVOA is worse.) Cleveland would win only one more game that season -- its final game in Cleveland Municipal Stadium -- and Modell decided not to bring the dour Belichick along to Baltimore, partly in fear that he would depress ticket sales. Since then, Cleveland has suffered through three seasons with no franchise and another dozen with a largely forgettable Browns team. Belichick? He turned out all right.
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9. 1996 New York Jets
<OFFER>The first season of the Rich Kotite era had been a disaster, as the Jets finished with a league-worst 3-13 record. To fix things, the team jumped into free agency with both feet, signing offensive tackles Jumbo Elliot and David Williams; lured Neil O'Donnell away from the AFC Champion Pittsburgh Steelers with a $25 million contract; and used the No. 1 pick on star USC receiver Keyshawn Johnson. The result? The Jets actually got worse. The offense improved a bit, but it was more than offset by a defensive collapse that saw the team's defensive DVOA go from minus-9.7 percent to 6.2 percent. After the 1-15 disaster, owner Leon Hess cleaned house, getting rid of Kotite (who claimed in his news conference that he wasn't fired and that he wasn't resigning) and wooing Bill Parcells away from the New England Patriots.
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8. 2009 New York Giants
Heading into their Week 6 showdown with New Orleans, the Giants were sitting at 5-0 and had outscored their opponents 151-71. The game was billed as an NFC championship preview, right up until the Saints spread the Giants defense out and tore it to shreds in a 48-17 rout. Offensive coordinators went to work on the game film, and the points started coming in bunches. Coming into the New Orleans game, the Giants' defensive DVOA was minus-25.8 percent, third-best in the league; by season's end, it was 6.4 percent, and their weighted DVOA, which focuses on the most recent games, was up to 14.9 percent. The Giants gave up an average of 30.8 points per game the rest of the year and finished the season by allowing 41 and 44 points in the last two games, prompting owner John Mara to issue a public apology for the team's effort.
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7. 2006 Seattle Seahawks
The 2005 Seahawks powered their way to the Super Bowl on the strength of the league's best offense. In 2006, that same offense was a bottom-five unit. The offensive line sorely missed guard Steve Hutchinson (who took a big-money deal from the Vikings); quarterback Matt Hasselbeck's completion percentage dropped nearly 9 percentage points as he struggled to mesh with new addition Deion Branch; and Shaun Alexander became the poster child for high-volume running backs abruptly falling apart. His DYAR (defense-adjusted yards above replacement) fell from 449 to minus-53, which made him the 45th-most valuable back in football just one year after winning MVP. Seattle still went 9-7 thanks to an atrocious NFC West, and even won a playoff game, but that just hid how far the team had fallen in one year.
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6. 2001 Tennessee Titans
The Titans went 26-6 in 1999-2000. They were particularly unbeatable at home, winning 16 of their first 17 games played in (then) Adelphia Coliseum. But a shocking 24-14 loss to the Ravens in the playoffs took the shine off their new digs, as Tennessee would go on to lose five home games in 2001 on its way to a disappointing 7-9 record. Injuries to star running back Eddie George were a major culprit, as he managed only 3 yards per carry while playing through toe and ankle injuries. An even bugger culprit was a defense that couldn't get to the quarterback and couldn't cover receivers … any receivers. The Titans' defensive DVOA ranked 30th against No. 1 receivers, 28th against No. 2 receivers and 30th against all other receivers. The bright spot was Steve McNair, who turned in his best season to date and whose development ensured that Tennessee wouldn't stay down for long.
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5. 1995 Miami Dolphins
In his final season, Don Shula loaded up for a Super Bowl run, doling out a then-whopping $12 million in signing bonuses, trading for defensive help in Trace Armstrong and Terrell Buckley, and adding Gary Clark, Randall and Eric Green to give Dan Marino some new weapons. The Dolphins were supposed to be a juggernaut, the AFC's answer to the Cowboys and 49ers, and they looked the part at first, dismantling the Jets 52-7 in the season opener and racing to a 4-0 start. But once Miami started to lose games, the locker room became divisive, and the specter of Jimmy Johnson loomed larger and larger. The Dolphins' offense got in the bad habit of starting slow; its first-half DVOA was only minus-3.0 percent, and although it shot up to 18.6 percent in the second half, the team was usually already in too deep of a hole. Miami staggered into the playoffs as a wild card at 9-7 and went down to its nemesis, the Buffalo Bills, 37-22; Shula was out, and Jimmy Johnson took over.
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4. 2010 Minnesota Vikings
Brett Favre giveth, and Brett Favre taketh away. One year after posting the best statistical season of his career, Favre derailed Minnesota's season in just about every way possible. He was a distraction in the offseason, both with his "Will he or won't he?" retirement act and with the investigation into his reported improprieties while playing with the New York Jets. When he stepped on the field, Favre looked completely out of sync with his receivers and threw a staggering 19 interceptions in only 358 attempts. Favre finished the year with a DYAR of minus-134, placing him between such luminaries as Charlie Whitehurst and Derek Anderson. The decline of the Williams Wall and the strange disappearance of sackmaster Jared Allen didn't help matters, either. Nor did the injuries that kept Favre's favorite target, Sidney Rice, out of the lineup for much of the year, or the end-of-season wandering caused by a snowstorm that collapsed the Metrodome roof. But the 6-10 disaster belonged to No. 4.
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3. 1999 San Francisco 49ers
Week 3 of the 1999 season. It's not always possible to pinpoint the exact moment when a dynasty comes to an end, but in the case of the 49ers, it is simple. When a blitzing Aeneas Williams slammed Steve Young into the turf, it ended the longest sustained period of team excellence in modern NFL history. Jeff Garcia stepped in as a 29-year-old rookie and performed credibly, throwing for 2,544 yards and 11 touchdowns, but it wasn't enough to offset the loss of the future Hall of Famer. The real problem was a defense that gave up 453 points just one year after surrendering only 328 and that allowed offenses to top the 40-point mark five times. San Francisco 's defensive DVOA was first or second in the league from 1995 to 1997, thanks in large part to a superlative pass defense. But injuries forced starters Darnell Walker and Ramos McDonald in and out of the lineup; the pass rush dried up; and the pass defense DVOA plummeted to 37 percent, worse even than that of the first-year Browns.
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2. 2002 St. Louis Rams
The Rams returned the same roster that had dominated the league in 2001, and most observers thought they would atone for their shocking Super Bowl loss by winning their second title in three years. It didn't work out that way. St. Louis sleepwalked through the preseason, and the alarm didn't go off even once the games were for real. Kurt Warner played like an Arena League castoff, opening the season with only one touchdown and seven interceptions before breaking a finger on his throwing hand, an injury that sidelined him for most of the season. Warner's DYAR was minus-95, just one year after generating a league-best DYAR of 1,667. The running game also fell off. Marshall Faulk accounted for nearly 1,500 yards from scrimmage, but that was down almost 700 yards from his MVP 2001 season. The Greatest Show on Turf was over.
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1. 2003 Oakland Raiders
Individual players get old, but it's unusual to see an entire team grow old overnight. Then again, most teams don't open the season with a 38-year-old quarterback, receivers who are 37 and 41, a trio of over-30 running backs and an assortment of defenders pushing 40. The Raiders clawed their way to a 2-2 start, but they looked slow and brittle, and the precision in their offense was gone. Then the wheels came off, as Oakland lost eight of its next nine games on the way to a 4-12 finish. The downturn in performance was dramatic and across the board, with everything from run defense to pass rush to pass protection affected. The Raiders' pass offense DVOA declined 51.1 percentage points in 12 months. For a team built around the pass, it was a catastrophe. Oakland let go of Tim Brown and Jerry Rice at season's end, and Rich Gannon lasted only three games into 2004 before suffering a career-ending neck injury. The worst period in Raiders history had begun.
These teams didn't live up the hype, didn't take the next step or just were plain awful
Sean McCormick
Football Outsiders
ESPN Insider
Most NFL teams enter the season with big hopes, but for many, those hopes are unfulfilled. Sometimes, that team is coming off a Super Bowl run and trying to make it back to the big game; other times, a team that added the last couple of free-agent pieces, after a few years of near misses, is trying to make the jump. Either way, there have been teams with high expectations that ended up crashing and burning … or, perhaps worse, middling along with a frustrating 9-7 wild-card season when fans feel as though that championship season is so close yet so far away.
Here are our picks for the 10 most disappointing teams of the past 25 years.
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10. 1995 Cleveland Browns
Bill Belichick is known as a control freak, but his last year in Cleveland was derailed by something completely out of his control. The Browns were building on a 1994 playoff appearance and were a chic Super Bowl pick when they raced out to a 3-1 start. However, at midseason, Cleveland was sitting at 4-4 when the news broke that owner Art Modell was going to relocate the team to Baltimore. The Browns' offensive DVOA in the eight remaining games slid from 3.6 percent to minus-12.6 percent, and the defense's DVOA ballooned from 2.0 percent to 15.4 percent. (You can find an explanation of FO's defense-adjusted value over average metric here; remember that a higher defensive DVOA is worse.) Cleveland would win only one more game that season -- its final game in Cleveland Municipal Stadium -- and Modell decided not to bring the dour Belichick along to Baltimore, partly in fear that he would depress ticket sales. Since then, Cleveland has suffered through three seasons with no franchise and another dozen with a largely forgettable Browns team. Belichick? He turned out all right.
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9. 1996 New York Jets
<OFFER>The first season of the Rich Kotite era had been a disaster, as the Jets finished with a league-worst 3-13 record. To fix things, the team jumped into free agency with both feet, signing offensive tackles Jumbo Elliot and David Williams; lured Neil O'Donnell away from the AFC Champion Pittsburgh Steelers with a $25 million contract; and used the No. 1 pick on star USC receiver Keyshawn Johnson. The result? The Jets actually got worse. The offense improved a bit, but it was more than offset by a defensive collapse that saw the team's defensive DVOA go from minus-9.7 percent to 6.2 percent. After the 1-15 disaster, owner Leon Hess cleaned house, getting rid of Kotite (who claimed in his news conference that he wasn't fired and that he wasn't resigning) and wooing Bill Parcells away from the New England Patriots.
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8. 2009 New York Giants
Heading into their Week 6 showdown with New Orleans, the Giants were sitting at 5-0 and had outscored their opponents 151-71. The game was billed as an NFC championship preview, right up until the Saints spread the Giants defense out and tore it to shreds in a 48-17 rout. Offensive coordinators went to work on the game film, and the points started coming in bunches. Coming into the New Orleans game, the Giants' defensive DVOA was minus-25.8 percent, third-best in the league; by season's end, it was 6.4 percent, and their weighted DVOA, which focuses on the most recent games, was up to 14.9 percent. The Giants gave up an average of 30.8 points per game the rest of the year and finished the season by allowing 41 and 44 points in the last two games, prompting owner John Mara to issue a public apology for the team's effort.
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7. 2006 Seattle Seahawks
The 2005 Seahawks powered their way to the Super Bowl on the strength of the league's best offense. In 2006, that same offense was a bottom-five unit. The offensive line sorely missed guard Steve Hutchinson (who took a big-money deal from the Vikings); quarterback Matt Hasselbeck's completion percentage dropped nearly 9 percentage points as he struggled to mesh with new addition Deion Branch; and Shaun Alexander became the poster child for high-volume running backs abruptly falling apart. His DYAR (defense-adjusted yards above replacement) fell from 449 to minus-53, which made him the 45th-most valuable back in football just one year after winning MVP. Seattle still went 9-7 thanks to an atrocious NFC West, and even won a playoff game, but that just hid how far the team had fallen in one year.
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6. 2001 Tennessee Titans
The Titans went 26-6 in 1999-2000. They were particularly unbeatable at home, winning 16 of their first 17 games played in (then) Adelphia Coliseum. But a shocking 24-14 loss to the Ravens in the playoffs took the shine off their new digs, as Tennessee would go on to lose five home games in 2001 on its way to a disappointing 7-9 record. Injuries to star running back Eddie George were a major culprit, as he managed only 3 yards per carry while playing through toe and ankle injuries. An even bugger culprit was a defense that couldn't get to the quarterback and couldn't cover receivers … any receivers. The Titans' defensive DVOA ranked 30th against No. 1 receivers, 28th against No. 2 receivers and 30th against all other receivers. The bright spot was Steve McNair, who turned in his best season to date and whose development ensured that Tennessee wouldn't stay down for long.
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5. 1995 Miami Dolphins
In his final season, Don Shula loaded up for a Super Bowl run, doling out a then-whopping $12 million in signing bonuses, trading for defensive help in Trace Armstrong and Terrell Buckley, and adding Gary Clark, Randall and Eric Green to give Dan Marino some new weapons. The Dolphins were supposed to be a juggernaut, the AFC's answer to the Cowboys and 49ers, and they looked the part at first, dismantling the Jets 52-7 in the season opener and racing to a 4-0 start. But once Miami started to lose games, the locker room became divisive, and the specter of Jimmy Johnson loomed larger and larger. The Dolphins' offense got in the bad habit of starting slow; its first-half DVOA was only minus-3.0 percent, and although it shot up to 18.6 percent in the second half, the team was usually already in too deep of a hole. Miami staggered into the playoffs as a wild card at 9-7 and went down to its nemesis, the Buffalo Bills, 37-22; Shula was out, and Jimmy Johnson took over.
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4. 2010 Minnesota Vikings
Brett Favre giveth, and Brett Favre taketh away. One year after posting the best statistical season of his career, Favre derailed Minnesota's season in just about every way possible. He was a distraction in the offseason, both with his "Will he or won't he?" retirement act and with the investigation into his reported improprieties while playing with the New York Jets. When he stepped on the field, Favre looked completely out of sync with his receivers and threw a staggering 19 interceptions in only 358 attempts. Favre finished the year with a DYAR of minus-134, placing him between such luminaries as Charlie Whitehurst and Derek Anderson. The decline of the Williams Wall and the strange disappearance of sackmaster Jared Allen didn't help matters, either. Nor did the injuries that kept Favre's favorite target, Sidney Rice, out of the lineup for much of the year, or the end-of-season wandering caused by a snowstorm that collapsed the Metrodome roof. But the 6-10 disaster belonged to No. 4.
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3. 1999 San Francisco 49ers
Week 3 of the 1999 season. It's not always possible to pinpoint the exact moment when a dynasty comes to an end, but in the case of the 49ers, it is simple. When a blitzing Aeneas Williams slammed Steve Young into the turf, it ended the longest sustained period of team excellence in modern NFL history. Jeff Garcia stepped in as a 29-year-old rookie and performed credibly, throwing for 2,544 yards and 11 touchdowns, but it wasn't enough to offset the loss of the future Hall of Famer. The real problem was a defense that gave up 453 points just one year after surrendering only 328 and that allowed offenses to top the 40-point mark five times. San Francisco 's defensive DVOA was first or second in the league from 1995 to 1997, thanks in large part to a superlative pass defense. But injuries forced starters Darnell Walker and Ramos McDonald in and out of the lineup; the pass rush dried up; and the pass defense DVOA plummeted to 37 percent, worse even than that of the first-year Browns.
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2. 2002 St. Louis Rams
The Rams returned the same roster that had dominated the league in 2001, and most observers thought they would atone for their shocking Super Bowl loss by winning their second title in three years. It didn't work out that way. St. Louis sleepwalked through the preseason, and the alarm didn't go off even once the games were for real. Kurt Warner played like an Arena League castoff, opening the season with only one touchdown and seven interceptions before breaking a finger on his throwing hand, an injury that sidelined him for most of the season. Warner's DYAR was minus-95, just one year after generating a league-best DYAR of 1,667. The running game also fell off. Marshall Faulk accounted for nearly 1,500 yards from scrimmage, but that was down almost 700 yards from his MVP 2001 season. The Greatest Show on Turf was over.
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1. 2003 Oakland Raiders
Individual players get old, but it's unusual to see an entire team grow old overnight. Then again, most teams don't open the season with a 38-year-old quarterback, receivers who are 37 and 41, a trio of over-30 running backs and an assortment of defenders pushing 40. The Raiders clawed their way to a 2-2 start, but they looked slow and brittle, and the precision in their offense was gone. Then the wheels came off, as Oakland lost eight of its next nine games on the way to a 4-12 finish. The downturn in performance was dramatic and across the board, with everything from run defense to pass rush to pass protection affected. The Raiders' pass offense DVOA declined 51.1 percentage points in 12 months. For a team built around the pass, it was a catastrophe. Oakland let go of Tim Brown and Jerry Rice at season's end, and Rich Gannon lasted only three games into 2004 before suffering a career-ending neck injury. The worst period in Raiders history had begun.
