Football Part 2: Tournament of Tears Revisited

(Blogsplosion Post #6)

I said I'd keep tabs on the Worst Teams in Football, so let's check in on them, shall we?

Unfortunately, we're all out of winless teams. Sorry, 2008 Detroit team, you're going to remain uniquely awful for a while longer.

Teams that have exited the tournament

The new threshold for the Tournament of Tears is five wins--that seems to be a pretty good dividing marker between the very sad and the merely mediocre. (Caveat: Chicago is at 5 wins, and they've gotten remarkably bad remarkably quickly. I considered adding them to the tournament on the strength of their multiple 30-point losses.) That means that Tennessee and Carolina have clawed their ways out. I can't get over how improbably the Titans' comeback has been--Vince Young has not just gotten better, but has turned the team around? Really?! So weird. And I'm happy for Carolina because one of those wins was over the Arizona team that out of nowhere destroyed them in the playoffs last year. So, good for you guys.

Four-win fellas

The four-win teams are both unpredictable. However, the Bills are just a little unpredictable--can't beat the Browns but you can beat Miami? Weird--whereas the Raiders . . . . Well, they're terrible. How can a team be terrible and still beat the Eagles, the Bengals, and the Steelers? (Yes, I know that these days, everybody beats the Steelers, but the Raiders were the first very bad team to do so.) That just doesn't make any sense.

Three wins is probably not a charm

I haven't seen the Chiefs play all year, but word on the street (which is to say, my dad told me) is they're shockingly bad. Nevertheless, they show flashes of . . . something. Not brilliance. Competence, maybe? I mean, they took the Cowboys and the Steelers to overtime (and even beat the Steelers--seriously, those guys are wreaking havoc in the Tournament of Tears, to the extent that they may soon join it). The same can be said of the Redskins--they mostly stink, but have flashes of . . . something. They had a big flash just last week when they really should have beaten the Saints. To paraphrase Bill Simmons, I don't think the NFL fixes games, but if by some chance they do, that was one they fixed. The Redskins needed all kind of crazy breaks in the Saints' favor (and bad, bad calls) to lose that game. (Although, even if they'd won, everybody would still get fired after this season. It's going to be a bloodbath.)

Repeat winners!

I have a friend whose dad is a Browns fan. He's angry at the team for beating the Steelers (or is he angry at the Steelers for losing to his team?) because it's going to hurt their draft pick. As Neal pointed out, it's always a bad sign when that's the fans' main concern. Their one other win is notable for having produced the most hilarious stat of the season: quarterback Derek Anderson lead his team to victory with a staggering two (2) completions out of 17 pass attempts. Hopefully there will be a good quarterback left at the third or fourth pick in the next draft.

I like to think that Detroit's fans are just psyched to be better than last year--two wins is so much more than zero, it really is. But I don't know any Detroit fans, so it's hard to say. I wouldn't blame them for being disappointed about losing to the Rams, though. I know I was disappointed. Speaking of . . .

One-win wonders

Like I said, it bums me out that the Rams managed to beat the Lions. It's hard to say whether I was more disappointed by that or when the Packers lost to the Buccaneers. On the one hand, I am personally invested in the Packers and I watched that game, in which they looked atrocious. It wasn't fun. On the other hand, I really believed the Rams could go winless and would have if they hadn't beaten Detroit. So if Detroit had won, it would have been a double victory--one for the wins column, and one for feeling better by having company in the 0-16 teams category.

The race for the first draft pick is a tight one, but I think the Rams will prevail as the Worst Team of 2009. The Bucs' quarterback, Josh Freeman, is a wild card--he has the ability to play really well or really lousy--and he may end up winning them another game. The Rams don't have a wild card, and without another Detroit-caliber team on their schedule, they're in excellent shape to get that #1 pick. (Ndamukong Suh?)