Where Have All the Dumb Teams Gone?
(Posted May 27, 2021)
There is an exciting new trend developing in front offices across the NFL: Widespread competence. Sure, there are some teams that are going to be bad this year, and next, but with just a few notable exceptions (Houston, we have a problem), just about every franchise now seems to have the right people in place to make decisions and coach players, and a reasonable plan to promote a successful culture and build a winner. That’s a noteworthy change from the collective NFL experience of the first two decades of this century, where long-term incompetence plagued a number of franchises.
In every season in any major professional sports league, you’re going to have winning teams, losing teams, and teams in the middle. And at the start of every season, the prognosticators and oddsmakers usually have a pretty good idea of who is going to be a winner, and who isn’t. Sure, there are surprises every year (the 2019 San Francisco 49ers come to mind), but we usually know. And that is certainly true for the upcoming NFL season. The difference this time around is that there is significantly more hope down the road for most of the “bad” teams that are rebuilding and not yet ready to contend for postseason play. There will always be losing teams each season, but what is vanishing is dumb teams. And that’s a good thing.
The NFL is designed to promote a competitive balance, with each team subjected to the same salary cap and related rules, and an annual draft of college players conducted in reverse order of finish from the prior year. So the teams at the bottom of the barrel and top of the heap should switch around pretty regularly. But for a lot of the past decade (or two), the NFL has been defined by haves and have-nots. A few teams have been consistently good to great and have regularly gone to the playoffs (New England is the poster child, but other franchises like Pittsburgh, Green Bay, Indianapolis, New Orleans, Seattle, and Philadelphia have also excelled), and at the other end of the spectrum a number of franchises have been just plain bad for an extended cycle (Cleveland, Detroit, Buffalo, Miami, Arizona, Tampa Bay, Oakland/Vegas, Washington and the NY Jets, most prominently). Sure, you could argue that what differentiates these categories of teams the most is having (or not having) a true franchise QB or two, but you could also argue that this story of long-term success and repeated failure reflects a very simple dichotomy between smart, well-managed teams and poorly managed teams that make dumb mistakes over and over. There are promising signs that the dumb teams are now very few and far between.
How do we know that the league is getting collectively smarter? One clue is the recent turnarounds of several of the franchises that were mired in extended failure. In 2017, in just the first season under new GM Brandon Beane and new HC Sean McDermott, the Bills ended the longest active playoff drought of any team in the four major sports, which dated back to 1999. The Bills made the playoffs again in both 2019 and 2020, going all the way to the AFC title game this past January. Buffalo has become the envy of the league for its approach to turning around a moribund franchise and building a winning culture and team, and especially as it relates to enabling the success of 2018 first round draft pick QB Josh Allen, who has shown drastic improvement each season. It’s a blueprint for success that other teams that have drafted QBs in the first round the past two seasons are trying to follow.
This past season, more signs emerged. The Browns (2002) and Bucs (2007) ended the NFL’s two longest active playoff droughts, with the Browns winning a playoff game and the Bucs, on the strength not only of free agent QB Tom Brady but also one of the most complete rosters in the league, hoisting the Lombardi. The Jets now have the longest playoff drought at ten years, but even that hapless franchise appears to be on the road to competence, with serious, capable people now in place as GM and HC, and a clear plan on the table to build a winning culture. It also appears that fewer owners are being overly meddlesome in personnel decisions, and are letting the football people do their jobs.
We can also see evidence of widespread competence if we look at the past season or two of offseason moves, such as GM and coaching hires, free agent acquisitions, cuts, contract restructurings, franchise tagging, and the draft. These things of course take time to play out, but what has been remarkable about the current off-season in particular is the lack of confounding, head-scratching moves. Sure, teams still make questionable decisions, spend money poorly, give up too much draft capital to move up, and reach for players at the draft. But nothing that has happened this off-season is even a third as idiotic as what the Texans did in March 2020 when they traded DeAndre Hopkins to the Cardinals for about 30 cents on the dollar.
If you google “dumbest moves of the 2021 NFL offseason” you will find several articles - these articles are written every off-season. What is remarkable is how comparatively benign the listed decisions are - and especially if you go back and look at similar articles from a few years or even a decade ago. When “the Raiders taking Alex Leatherwood with the 17th pick” and “the Titans signing Bud Dupree to a big free agent contract” are each listed as one of the five dumbest moves of the offseason, then you know that there really isn’t that much to write about in a “dumbest moves” column. The 2021 free agency period was thankfully bereft of anything like the 2008 Albert Haynesworth signing or the 2019 Le’Veon Bell signing (or many other dubious signings from the years in between). And the 2021 draft was remarkable for its lack of highly questionable decisions, something we are used to seeing annually. Even Giants’ GM Dave Gettleman traded down not once but twice, pocketing more draft capital in the process. That’s when this reader knew for sure that a new, smarter era had dawned in the NFL.
