So far this season, the Jacksonville Jaguars, Tampa Bay Buccaneers, and Miami Dolphins hold a combined 1-8 record, thereby continuing a pattern they’ve followed for the last half-decade.
Chart Party: Florida’s NFL teams are sad as all hell
Let’s hear it for the state of Florida, our nation’s chief importer of losses and exporter of points.
Jason Getz-USA TODAY Sports
Remove all traces of the Florida football teams from the NFL’s win-loss columns, and the league’s cumulative winning percentage would be .514 over this five-year stretch. That may not sound like a huge difference, but it takes a whole lot of losing to move that needle at all.
Between 2009 and this weekend’s action, these three teams have a combined 92-157 record. It would be bad enough for one team to play .370 football over a 15-year stretch, but that is certainly conceivable. Terrible ownership, lack of direction, bad drafting, a toxic atmosphere, and any other number of things are certainly capable of poisoning the well and leaving an NFL franchise in a perpetual lurch.
This is special, because we’re looking at three different test tubes here. Three different franchises, sets of personnel, hierarchies of ownership, fan bases, rivals, everything. There’s no reason all three of them should be failing so dramatically. And yet!
Again: one team misses the playoffs for many, many years in a row? Well, that’s explained by “it’s the Browns” or “it’s the Raiders.” That three completely different teams can combine in this effort is staggering.
If it weren’t for the state of Florida, the rest of us would be hurting for two commodities: oranges and points.
Throughout all of those seasons reflected above, only two of them finished with a positive point differential: the 2010 Buccaneers (+23) 2011 Dolphins (+16). Those are almost negligible as stacked against the worst seasons: -156, -189, -202, -207.
I have decided that I am not going to play for any of Florida’s NFL teams.
See More:
