I’m not an NFL fan, but it has not escaped my notice that Detroit is doing well this year. This seems odd to me, as an NFL outsider, because my definite impression is that the Lions have traditionally been helpless.
So I went looking, and found this excellent Wikipedia page, which includes a sortable table of all NFL teams by regular season record.
The table, interestingly, includes a column for games played. There’s a HUGE range here. The OG teams like Chicago, Green Bay, etc, are all over 1400 games at this point — but the newest team, our hometown Houston Texans, are at only 355.
Anyway, a few interesting takeaways:
First, the actual RANGE of regular season records is narrower than you might think. The winningest team is, despite my understanding of contemporary performance, Dallas. They’re at .576. The worst is Tampa, at .406.
Detroit IS towards the bottom; they’re 26th out of 32 at .455. But that’s pretty close to even, right?
The bottom five are, in descending order, Atlanta (.439), Houston, Jacksonville, Arizona (nee St Louis, and with Chicago the only remaining OG team), and Tampa Bay.
The “worst” team over .500 is the Rams, at .506, in 16th place.
Playoff records are also available. To probably no one’s surprise, given the Brady years, New England is that the top of that list. They’re at .627 in the postseason, followed by San Francisco (.613), Green Bay (.586), Baltimore (.567), and the Steelers (.563).
At the bottom, we find Cleveland at .353.
This sent me down a rabbit hole, because I thought I remembered that “Cleveland” of today is actually an expansion team, and that the “real” Browns moved to Baltimore to become the Ravens.
This was functionally true at the time (1995), but when Art Modell moved the squad to Baltimore he took the players, personnel, etc., the NFL treated Baltimore as an expansion team and left the Cleveland IP in trust and suspended. The NFL guaranteed that Cleveland would get a new Browns no later than 1999. Sure enough, when Cleveland resumed play in ’99, it was with an expansion draft, but this expansion team got to “inherit” the stats and history of the Browns. So at Wikipedia, Cleveland is credited with a 1950 founding date and 1,053 games played, while Baltimore is treated as a team founded in 1996. This is some serious doublethink bullshit, candidly, but it’s football so whatever.