On Sunday night, a matchup between two of the NFL's best teams was settled with a 49ers blowout of Dak Prescott and the Cowboys. Earlier in the day, though, I was perhaps even more entertained by a matchup at the bottom of the standings. The Broncos and Jets were unknowingly fighting a battle to avoid being mentioned (or at least considered) as a potential candidate for my Monday column: Who is currently the worst team in the National Football League?
By record, that's the 0-5 Panthers, but there's more to their situations than looking at the standings. Carolina is bad, of course, but has it been as awful as Denver looked during its 70-20 defeat to Miami? As the Bears did during the beginning of the season on offense? As the Patriots have over the past two weeks? Stink is in the nose of the beholder, and some might prefer a less-than-competitive Panthers team to a hopelessly overmatched Patriots or Broncos team, even if the latter two organizations have a win to their name.
Let's sort through six of the worst teams in football and what has gone wrong for them through five games. I'm leaving out the Cardinals (who have been extremely competitive before an ugly performance against the Bengals on Sunday) and the Raiders (who haven't yet played in Week 5), but with those two included, we'd be breaking down the bottom quarter of the NFL.
I'll get to which team sits in the basement at the end, but let's begin with a (relatively) optimistic look at a team that seems hell-bent on proving a core tenet of my analysis for more than a decade now. We'll go from the (relatively) best to worst, starting with the league's No. 27 team and ending at No. 32:
Jump to a team:
Bears | Broncos | Giants
Panthers | Patriots | Vikings
27. Minnesota Vikings (1-4)
Their case as the worst team in football: While I'm going to give you some of the numbers about being unlucky later in this column, nobody can deny how aesthetically unappealing it has been to watch them play this season. It feels like they're stuck in the same game every week, where their style of play and limitations lead them to the same frustrating results.
How do you concoct a Vikings game? Start with a defense intent on banging its head against the wall. The move from Ed Donatell to Brian Flores at coordinator successfully shifted Minnesota from a passive, Vic Fangio-style defense to a wildly aggressive one. The Vikings are blitzing on an unreal 54% of opposing dropbacks so far. No other team is over 40%. Just two teams over the past 15 seasons have blitzed more than 50% of the time over a full campaign, and they're both coaches who lived and died with pressure: Rex Ryan's 2009 Jets and Gregg Williams' 2011 Saints.