Collapses are the NFL’s hottest trend. Which team wore it best?

The NFL has a strange problem in 2018. No one seems all that interested in the final Wild Card playoff spots in either of its conferences.

For weeks, no team seem interested in grabbing the No. 6 seed in the NFC before the Vikings fired their offensive coordinator and stopped a 1-3 skid by routing the Dolphins. Now they’ve got to hold off the plummeting Panthers, a Washington team led by a starting quarterback with exactly one win on his record since being drafted in 2008, and the Eagles — who no one really knows what to make of — in order to see Week 17.

Miami, the team they beat, is part of a cohort of six- and seven-loss teams in the AFC whose quest for a one-week season extension have all been derailed by de-pantsing defeats. The Colts started their season with a 1-5 record. The Titans have continued a longstanding tradition of wavering between great and awful, this time neatly compressed into a single season. The Broncos drilled their own potholes into an easy road to a nine-win season by losing to the 49ers and Browns immediately after dispatching the Steelers and Chargers.

But not all collapses are created equal. Which team destroyed the hopes and dreams of its fans the hardest this fall? We’ve got a long list to churn through before we can find the answer.

Two games and counting. For the Patriots, it’s a function of being unable to win on the road and Rob Gronkowski’s inability to play safety.

For the Rams, it’s the issue of Jared Goff suddenly turning into Derek Anderson.

Los Angeles has the more troublesome flaw to correct, but Sean McVay’s team has already clinched the NFC West and controls its path to a first round bye this postseason. New England doesn’t have that luxury. Wins over the Dolphins and Steelers would have put the Pats atop the AFC standings; instead, a four-game losing streak would potentially end their death grip on the AFC East.

Fortunately for both teams, massive bounce-back opportunities await. The Rams play the hapless Cardinals in Week 16. The Patriots will host the Bills.

The Vikings vacated their claim to the NFC North title with a Thanksgiving-time swoon that dropped the club to 6-6-1 on the season and into the conference’s final playoff space by virtue of the craptitude of the other contending teams in the race. When Minnesota’s schedule turned up the heat on last year’s NFC finalists, the Vikings wilted. Mike Zimmer’s team lost games to the Patriots, Bears, and Seahawks while only beating a disappointing Packers team in a four-week span.

That’s endemic of another problem set to derail Minnesota’s playoff hopes; the Vikings are 0-5 against teams currently set to make the 2018 postseason.

Fortunately, the Vikings were able to survive that slide and remain in playoff contention. The December firing of offensive coordinator John DeFilippo, once considered a rising star among head coaching candidates, seems to have paid immediate dividends. Minnesota found its rhythm under interim OC Kevin Stefanski after a 41-17 shellacking of the Dolphins, but time will tell whether that explosion is sustainable or just a side effect of hosting an awful Miami defense.

Tennessee has been a difficult team to figure out in 2018. The Titans have beaten postseason contenders like the Patriots, Cowboys, Eagles, and Texans. They’ve also lost to the Bills and Colts; the latter of which wouldn’t be so damaging, except it came in a 38-10 mud-hole stomping.

That midseason slump allowed the Texans to take over the AFC South and leave Tennessee staggering along the periphery of playoff contention. The Titans went from 3-1 to 5-6 in a two month span, forming an island of quality wins (Dallas, New England) in the middle of a sprawling sea of disappointment. A timely, if unimpressive three-game winning streak — over the Jaguars and both the residents of north Jersey’s football hellmouth — has the franchise in shape for a Wild Card berth, but it won’t be easy. A Week 17 showdown with the Indianapolis team that ground them into powder and snorted them in a 28-point November win could wind up serving as a de facto playoff game.

Pittsburgh found a way to correct its path and avoid the death spiral that would have pushed the Ravens to the AFC North’s top spot and a playoff game where Baltimore runs the ball 50 times and gains 240 total yards. The Steelers took advantage of the Patriots’ road weaknesses and Tom Brady’s sudden mortality to ensure a three-game losing streak didn’t become a five-game skid with a trip to New Orleans coming up.

But woof, things were ugly there for a minute.

Losses to the Chargers (understandable) and Broncos (ehhhhh) gave way to a three-point defeat at the hands of the Raiders, who are currently just a petri dish where all the bacteria look like Jon Gruden’s sunburned face.

At 7-5-1, the Steelers were teetering on the edge of contention, and their three-game slump means they could still wind up looking up at Baltimore when the season comes to a close.

Vance Joseph faced a treacherous climb above the clouds after a 3-6 start, but unlikely wins over the Steelers and Chargers punched him through the turbulence and into clear air after Week 12. The Broncos may have been 5-6, but the league’s easiest remaining schedule gave them plenty of room to make a run to the postseason.

Things started smoothly enough with a win over the Bengals, and a 49ers-Browns-Raiders lineup seemed like the perfect setup to push Joseph’s team to nine-wins and a Week 17 home showdown against an LA team it had already beaten. Instead, Denver vomited all over itself, losing to football god Nick Mullens in Santa Clara and then, impressively, settling for three points while trailing by four late in a loss to the no-longer-hopeless Browns.

Denver’s playoff hopes are dead. They expired right around the same time Joseph’s viability as an NFL head coach came to a close. At least the Broncos can still mess things up for the Chargers.

It was easy to explain away Green Bay’s first season without a playoff bid since 2008 last fall — it was because Aaron Rodgers was hurt. Unfortunately for the Packers, that easy answer wound up covering up a litany of other weaknesses across the roster. When it became clear a healthy Rodgers was no longer the team’s panacea, the outcome was a fired Mike McCarthy and a second-straight season where players were allowed to escape the Wisconsin winter before January hit.

Green Bay’s deficiencies were on display all season, whether it was a product of a young, growing secondary, a wide receiving corps that was forced to start a pair of 2018 Day 3 draft picks over the course of multiple games, or a top-heavy offensive line that couldn’t hold up to a midseason rash of injuries. All these factored into one of Rodgers’ worst seasons as a pro and a 5-8-1 record. Things are so hopeless in Green Bay that you can attend the storied franchise’s season finale on the hallowed ground of Lambeau Field for just $46.

This spiral may continue through the rest of the season. Aaron Jones, who came into Week 15 averaging 5.6 yards per carry and with an outside shot at a 1,000-yard season on the ground, just hit injured reserve. And, for reasons not entirely clear, Green Bay went from a three-point favorite to a one-point underdog for what looked like a cakewalk game against the Jets earlier in the season.

Jay Gruden’s team has a good excuse for its struggles; not only did Washington lose its starting quarterback to a grisly broken leg, but also lost its backup to another, much less gruesome break. That led us into an alternate universe where Mark Sanchez was a starting NFL quarterback in 2018. It went, uh, oh no.

Sanchez’s Week 14 start marked a fourth straight loss for Washington, a team that previously led the tempestuous NFC East following Week 10 this fall. That streak could only be broken by the presence of Alliance of American Football draftee Josh Johnson and a visit to the No. 2 team on the list. Johnson recorded his first ever win as a starter last week. His NFL career began in 2008.

There was so much to like about the Jaguars in 2018. The core of the league’s No. 2 scoring defense returned en masse. 2017 No. 4 overall pick Leonard Fournette was set to build from a solid rookie campaign. A 3-1 start exorcised the team’s biggest demon thanks to a dominant 11-point win over the Patriots in Week 2.

But the team’s potential this fall was ultimately marred by the most obvious thing to hate about them in 2014 through 2016 — quarterback play.

Blake Bortles finally stunk his way to a mid-season benching. His replacement, Cody Kessler, has been given ample opportunities to show why the Browns put Kevin Hogan ahead of him in their pecking order of depressing QBs in 2017. While the Jags’ defense ranks sixth in the NFL in both yards and points allowed this fall — a step back from 2017 — the club’s offense has been almost non-existent. The only teams scoring less than Jacksonville are the Bills and Cardinals, neither of whom entertained even the wildest ideas of contention in 2018.

The Jaguars, though? They looked like AFC favorites four weeks into the season, and instead they’re headed for a top five draft pick.

Jacksonville’s collapse has been epic, but at least it came early enough in the season to prevent fans from building any real hope. Panthers fans, however, weren’t given that luxury.

At the midway point of the 2018 season, Carolina was 6-2 and barreling toward a second-straight playoff appearance. The Panthers are currently 6-8 and need some kind of avian flu to break out across the NFC to have any realistic shot at the playoffs. The team that beat the Ravens, Eagles, and Cowboys early in the season became the one who lost to the Browns, Buccaneers, and Lions. And it all began when the Steelers absolutely stole Carolina’s soul in a 52 -21 Thursday Night Football beatdown in Week 10.

That’s turned a club that returned most of its valuable players from an 11-win season into one of the league’s most hopeless clubs. After raising the hopes of their fans, the Panthers have kicked their legs out with aplomb.

Carolina’s impressive collapse has been felt around the sporting landscape. And it’s made Ron Rivera, a man with a 70-55-1 record and an NFC title under his belt in eight seasons in Charlotte, the betting favorite to be the next head coach fired this winter.