NFC South: the worst division in recent NFL history?

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http://mmqb.si.com/2014/11/20/nfc-south-nfl-worst-division/

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Trending South
The NFL hasn't seen a team with a losing record in the playoffs since 2010. The eventual winner of the NFC South—currently led by the four-win Falcons—could be next, which begs the question: is it the worst division in recent NFL history?
By Keith Goldner/numberFire.com

After the Bengals defeated the Saints on Sunday, both the Falcons and Panthers had a primo opportunity: Facing off against one another, the winner would take control of the NFC South with a domineering four wins on its résumé.

The Falcons currently lead this dismal division at 4-6, with the Saints in second at 4-6 based on a head-to-head tiebreaker. The Panthers, who have a bye this week, sit in third at 3-7-1. In last sits the Buccaneers, who are down but not out at 2-8.

Here are our current NFL playoff probabilities for the South:

New Orleans: 49.7%
Atlanta: 36.6%
Carolina: 13.2%
Tampa Bay: 0.5%

But just how bad is the NFC South? Is this the worst division in this millennium? To evaluate teams, we look at their efficiency using our internal metric, Net Expected Points (NEP). A quick refresher on NEP:

NEP compares every single play over a season to how a league-average team should perform on that play. Every situation on a football field has an expected point value; that is, how many points an average team would be expected to score in that situation (given down, distance-to-go and yard line). For example, the Chiefs may be playing the Steelers, facing a third-and-two on the 50. That’s a ton of variables, but numberFire has data from the past dozen years of every single play, so most situations have come up at least once.

According to our data, an average team may be “expected” to score 1.23 (estimated number) points on that drive. However, Jamaal Charles reels off a 32-yard run to bring the Chiefs into the red zone, increasing the “expected” point value of the next play to 4.23 (still an estimated number) points. Jamaal Charles then gets credit for the difference, in this case 2.96 points, as his NEP total. That’s Net Expected Points.


The NFC South is the worst division this season with an average team total NEP of -40.6. That means that in the division, on average, teams have already scored or allowed almost six touchdowns below expectation. The next worst division is the AFC South at -32.2, followed by the AFC West at 0.0 (both divisions are brought down by particularly bad teams in Jacksonville and Oakland).

Let’s pace out the South’s current performance and compare it to the worst of the worst.

2010 NFC WEST

Remember how bad the NFC West was in 2010? Seattle became the first playoff team in the modern era to make the playoffs with a sub-.500 record, going 7-9. While the West didn’t have one truly horrible team (all four teams notched at least five wins), their average total NEP across offense, defense, and special teams was -107.3, meaning that, on average, each team scored or allowed 15 more touchdowns versus expectation.

Due to the recent success of the NFC West, many people forget just how bad the division was—and for a long time. In fact, seven of the 13 worst divisions since 2000 came from the NFC West between 2004 and 2010 (including the three worst and five of the bottom seven).

Other notable poor divisions: 2012 and 2013 AFC South (headlined by brutal Jacksonville teams), 2011 AFC West (The Year of Tebow), 2002 NFC North (Three teams with six wins or fewer).

2014 NFC SOUTH

The Saints, Falcons, Panthers and Bucs have NEP totals of +2.5, -18.2, -48.0, and -98.7, respectively. The division’s current path puts them on pace to finish as the 10th-worst division since 2000.

Most notable, though, is just how terrible the division’s defense has been. If trends continue, the NFC South would allow +481.5 NEP defensively. That means that, on average, each team would allow 120 more points than a league-average defense—more than 17 touchdowns, or more than one additional touchdown given up per game.

Will we see another sub-.500 team make the playoffs? Here are our projections for the number of wins required to win the NFC South:

mmqb_week11.png


That leaves a 36.88% chance of the division winner totaling fewer than eight wins.

The NFC South is bad. Very bad. But are they the worst division in history? Not quite.

THE BEST DIVISION

The antithesis to the NFC South, the AFC North currently features all four teams over .500. So, are they that much better than the NFC South? Currently, each AFC North team is, on average, +52.5 NEP better than each NFC South team—between 7 and 8 touchdowns better. That puts the AFC North on pace to finish an estimated 12 touchdowns ahead of the NFC South.

The best division this season is the AFC East with a dominant Patriots squad, and surprisingly efficient Bills and Dolphins teams. The AFC North comes in at third overall.

Keith Goldner is the chief analyst at numberFire.com, the leading fantasy sports analytics platform. Follow him@keithgoldner.
 

LesBaker

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Due to the recent success of the NFC West, many people forget just how bad the division was—and for a long time. In fact, seven of the 13 worst divisions since 2000 came from the NFC West between 2004 and 2010 (including the three worst and five of the bottom seven).

That is so bad it's almost like it was made up for a movie or a book.

I'm thinking that SF and SEA are stagnating/declining and the Rams are rising at the right time. Maybe fate is smiling on us rather than opposing us.
 

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http://profootballtalk.nbcsports.com/2014/11/20/a-five-win-nfc-south-champion-is-a-real-possibility/

A five-win NFC South champion is a real possibility
Posted by Michael David Smith on November 20, 2014

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AP

If you’ve been following the NFL this year, you’re probably aware that the NFC South is terrible. But you might not realize how terrible.

Consider this: It’s entirely possible that a five-win team will win the NFC South, and therefore win a playoff game.

Using the ESPN Playoff Machine to simulate the rest of the season, I found a fairly plausible scenario in which the Panthers win the NFC South with a 5-10-1 record, with the Falcons and Saints tied for second at 5-11 and the Buccaneers last at 3-13. This isn’t the most likely scenario, but it didn’t require a lot of crazy upsets, either.

So what is the most likely scenario? Football Outsiders does a playoff projection for the rest of the season that says the Saints are the most likely team to win the division, and their most likely record is 7-9. But there’s still a decent chance of the Falcons winning the division, and the Panthers are definitely not out of it. Even the 2-8 Buccaneers are only two games out of first place and still have a 0.3 percent chance of winning the division, even though according to Football Outsiders stats the Bucs are actually the worst team in the league, even worse than the Raiders.

At the moment, the 4-6 Falcons are in first place even though they’re 0-6 outside the division. It wouldn’t be a shock to see the Falcons lose their next four games to drop to 4-10, then win their remaining division games (against the Saints and Panthers in Weeks 16 and 17), and win the division with a record of 6-10, which would be 6-0 against the NFC South and 0-10 against the rest of the NFL.

So if a five-win team or a six-win team ends up winning the NFC South, what would the point spread be for their first-round playoff game? The last time a team with a losing record won its division was in January of 2011, when the 7-9 Seahawks hosted the wild card Saints, and the Saints opened as a 10.5-point favorite. At the moment, the Packers would be the No. 5 seed in the NFC, and given the way the Packers have played lately, they could easily be favored by that much at Atlanta.

Realistically, however, if the Packers keep playing the way they’ve been playing, they won’t be a wild card team. In the Playoff Machine scenario I ran, the Lions were the wild card team heading to Carolina to play the 5-10-1 Panthers in the first round of the playoffs. And the Lions would not be huge favorites at Carolina, especially considering that the Panthers beat the Lions 24-7 in Week Two. It’s entirely possible that a 5-10-1 Panthers team could not only make the playoffs, but advance.

So, those of us who enjoy crazy, chaotic stories in the NFL should perhaps root for everyone in the NFC South to keep losing — until January, when they turn things around. Perhaps we could see a Super Bowl featuring a team with a losing record.
 

LesBaker

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Man the Falcons have just fallen apart haven't they, and it wasn't that long ago that they were considered a team that "is doing it right". Now it seems like they do everything wrong and Matt Ryan's career is being totally wasted. I'd give up a lot to get that guy if I was Snead but I'm sure they aren't trading him since without him they may not have won more than one game last year and the same for this year.

The Saints, despite the record, are dangerous because they can erupt on O and steal a game. Brees can still sling it.
 

Sleepy1711

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Ummm...shouldn't they wait for the season to end before jumping the gun about this being the worse in history? Theres like six games left!!
 

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http://mmqb.si.com/2014/11/26/nfl-playoff-format-pending-debacle/

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Staring Down a Disaster
How bad is the NFC South? How broken is the playoff format? In one scenario, the NFL could have its first division champ with 10 or more losses and its first 12-win team miss the postseason. It’s time for common sense to trump tradition
By Don Banks

Fresh off another embarrassing winless week in the laughingstock NFC South—and if you’re keeping score, that’s three of those this season, compared to two for the league’s other seven divisions combined—the NFL finds itself staring down the disaster that now is more likely than ever to unfold. And that it so richly deserves.

Get ready for the NFL’s first double-digit loss division champion, football fans. And don’t forget this is a league that values tradition above all else. Especially common sense.

With the Falcons (4-7) and Saints (4-7) locked into an epic race for the title of Worst Playoff Team in League History, now seems like a good time to once again reexamine the flaws and inequity of the NFL’s playoff seeding format, which stubbornly continues to reward and prioritize division champions, even if their records are far inferior to wild-card qualifiers.

And I don’t mean to slight the lowly Carolina Panthers (3-7-1) or Tampa Bay Buccaneers (2-9) whatsoever in this discussion, because it’s virtually impossible to eliminate yourself in the NFC South this season. Lord knows the Panthers and Bucs have tried. Then again, so have the Falcons and Saints.

If was four years ago, of course, that we finally hit the new low of having a division champ with a losing record, when the 7-9 Seahawks won the NFC West and a No. 4 seed, which meant they got to host the 11-5 wild-card Saints, the NFC’s No. 5 seed. Naturally, Seattle took full advantage and sent the defending Super Bowl champions home for the winter. The same way the No. 4-seeded Chargers (8-8) did at home against the 12-4, fifth-seeded visiting Colts in 2008, despite Indianapolis having already beaten San Diego in the regular season.

But 6-10 and still Super Bowl dreaming? What in the name of Pete Rozelle’s beloved parity is going on here? It not only could happen in the NFC South this year, it probably will. I’m no math major, but consider that either the Falcons or Saints will have to play winning ball at 3-2 over the last five weeks of the season just to get to 7-9—and the whole concept of playing winning ball has been rather elusive this year in the division.

The NFL has featured weak divisions before. But it has never come close to the four-team train wreck that is this year’s NFC South. The entire division should be forced to play games encircled by yellow police tape, that’s how much of a calamity the NFC South has been in 2014. When the Saints lost their third straight at home on Monday night, falling 34-27 to the Ravens, the entire division was at least three games under .500—the first time that has ever happened in any division at the close of a week, according to the Elias Sports Bureau.

The topic of re-seeding the playoffs by records has become a familiar debate by now. Every few years or so it resurfaces, and every time we get the same tired answer from NFL ownership: The league has always awarded division champions with at least one home playoff game, and that’s a tradition that enough owners believe merits keeping.

When the NFL’s competition committee last dared to recommend the idea of seeding the playoffs strictly by record—as it did in early 2011—a majority of the owners expressed support for the plan, but the idea died because it never came remotely close to garnering the necessary 24 out of 32 votes for passage.

One longtime NFL competition committee member told me he remembers being surprised by the strength and depth of push-back from some owners, who in 2011 lobbied strenuously on behalf of the “sanctity’’ of division winners being awarded a home playoff game. That same committee member thinks the current outdated format will eventually be changed, once the right tipping point has been reached and a sufficient firestorm of protest ensues from a wholly undeserving division champion.

Hello, NFC South! It’s time to do your part.

Playoff scenarios are dime a dozen at this time of year, but there are fairly plausible permutations in which the NFC South could wind up with a 5-11 or 6-10 champion, while a vastly more deserving 11-5 wild-card contender could miss the playoffs entirely. Let’s say the Falcons and Cowboys play those two bizarro-world roles and see what chaos ensues in today’s social media-driven atmosphere. Or substitute the Saints and Packers. You choose. It’s mind-blowing fun. For a league that’s already a little gun-shy on the bad public relations front, it’d be almost worth a penalty for piling on.

In at least one specific playoff scenario, the NFL could have a historic double whammy on its hands: its first division champ with 10 or more losses and its first 12-win team to miss the postseason. That would require some deft explaining from a league that talks endlessly about the quality of its on-field product. Even the specter of the 6-10 Saints playing host to the 12-4 Cowboys in a first-round playoff game at the Superdome would be almost indefensible for the NFL, especially if you’re Jerry Jones and you built a $1.3 billion stadium that goes empty that weekend.

The first round of the playoffs is all but guaranteed to set a new ugly precedent that will make everyone question the NFL’s overzealous defense of tradition. If the events of this lost season in the NFC South don’t loosen some owners’ grip on the ill-advised belief that division titles trump all, nothing ever will.
 

Athos

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Man the Falcons have just fallen apart haven't they, and it wasn't that long ago that they were considered a team that "is doing it right". Now it seems like they do everything wrong and Matt Ryan's career is being totally wasted. I'd give up a lot to get that guy if I was Snead but I'm sure they aren't trading him since without him they may not have won more than one game last year and the same for this year.

The Saints, despite the record, are dangerous because they can erupt on O and steal a game. Brees can still sling it.

That trade for Julio really hasn't done much for the Falcons. And losing all those picks probably set them back. That, and not finding a real RB in the last several years.
 

rhinobean

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Thinking that the nfc south was lucky to play the nfc west last year instead of this year! Their record would be worse with all the changes that happened to them in the off season!