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The hardest schedule in the history of football almost certainly belongs to a bottom feeder in an otherwise brutal division. The 2000 Bears, for instance, had a grand total of two games against teams with losing records. They played the 11-5 Vikings twice, the 10-6 Buccaneers twice, and the 12-4 Giants, 11-5 Eagles, 11-5 Dolphins, 10-6 Colts, and 10-6 Saints once apiece.
If you're going to restrict your definition of "most difficult schedule in league history" to total number of games (by counting stats, not rate) against teams with a 13-3 record or better, then you're basically limiting it to teams like the Giants - mediocre regular season clubs that went to the Super Bowl. I'm not sure there would be universal agreement that this is the sole determining factor for toughest schedule ever.
Their regular season schedule was tough for playoff teams* (obviously, the weakest teams often play the toughest schedules, so there are plenty of non-playoff teams that had much tougher schedules than the 2011 Giants), but not historically so. Just going back one year, by FBRef's SOS ranking, the 2010 Jets played a considerably tougher regular season slate (a 2.5 rating to the Giants' 2.0), then met the 10-6 Colts, 14-2 Pats and 12-4 Steelers in the playoffs).
* I did notice this. Other than the Giants, the 2011 playoff field all played pretty unimpressive schedules. I wouldn't say it's enough to lift them into the stratsophere of the 13-wins-or-better club, but it's a point in their favor.
If you're going to restrict your definition of "most difficult schedule in league history" to total number of games (by counting stats, not rate) against teams with a 13-3 record or better
I wouldn't restrict it to that, but if I were an elite or elite wanna-be team I'd rather play 2 8-8 teams than a 13-3 team and a 3-13 team (conversley, the 2000 Bears would probably rather play the 3-13 and 13-3 teams). So I do think the top-heaviness of the Giants' schedule is worth considering.
1, desean jackson has been placed on injured reserve.
2, jason babin has been cut.
3, "5 QBs have had a passer rating of 120 or higher against Todd Bowles in 5 weeks. 7 had a rating of 120+ against Jim Johnson ... in 10 years."
4, "There’s currently a grand total of TWO teams in the entire league with fewer wins than the Eagles. The Chiefs are 1-10, and the Jaguars are 2-9. Three other teams – the Panthers, Browns and Raiders – are tied with the Eagles with three wins."
"The Browns and Raiders have to play each other (this week). The Panthers and Raiders meet in Week 16. Carolina, Oakland and Cleveland all still have to face the 1-10 Chiefs. In other words, someone’s got to win those games."
I didn't think the 2000 Bears had the toughest schedule in NFL history, just that that's the model for one. Now that SOSH U pointed out football-reference's Strength of Schedule ranking, I see that the 1975 Browns had a whopping 4.2 SOS. They had:
12-2 Steelers twice
11-3 Bengals twice
10-4 Oilers twice
12-2 Vikings once
11-3 Raiders once
10-4 Colts once
8-6 Redskins once
7-7 Lions once
6-8 Broncos once
5-9 Chiefs once
2-12 Saints once
That's a beast.
Wow! .637 when you exclude the games with the Browns. I'll accept it.
Is there a place you found historical SoS rankings, or were you browsing seasons and came across that one?
For 2011 -
DVOA (accounts for SOS etc) has the Niners ahead of Pats by a hair. Followed by Denver, Seattle, Chicago.
Advancedfootballstats team efficiency (ignores special teams) has Denver, SF, HOU, Seattle, CAROLINA - NE has the 30th ranked defense
pro-football reference (essentially margin of victory corrected for SoS) goes NE >> SF > CHI,DEN,TEX.
NE has a much better MoV than SF, because they don't stop trying to score up 21 in the 2nd half (while the Niners go into turtle mode... which makes some amount of sense given their defense is good).
SF actually has the 2nd most _efficient_ (on a per-play basis) offense by success rate. But they don't pile up yards.
if he's healthy, i'm fairly sure he'll go in the top 10 on draft day.
And why is NE Pennsylvania watching TB vs Denver?
My theory is that the ref lockout pretty much made the crappier refs even worse than usual. But people haven't noticed that much because its still better than the supposedly worse replacement refs.
On Brees' first 5th INT offsides was called - but I saw no laundry and there wasn't much of a replay. Can't say for sure if it was a bad call.
that is exactly what i've seen going back to last season, even going back to that ####### tie against the bengals in 2009. the decline of the eagles isn't about foles and it's not about vick, it's about a coaching staff that is disinterested and disengaged, and that just isn't focused enough and that doesn't work hard enough.
12-2 Steelers twice
11-3 Bengals twice
10-4 Oilers twice
12-2 Vikings once
11-3 Raiders once
10-4 Colts once
8-6 Redskins once
7-7 Lions once
6-8 Broncos once
5-9 Chiefs once
2-12 Saints once
That's a beast.
The real beast that year was the AFC Central. When the top three teams weren't playing each other, they had a combined record of 27-3. The Steelers lost only to the 8-6 Bills and the 12-2 Rams, the Bengals lost only to the 3-11 Browns, and the Oilers were 10-0 against every team other than the Steelers and the Bengals. The Steelers went on to win the Super Bowl, while the Wild Card Bengals lost a 3-point heartbreaker on the road to the 10-4 Raiders in the first round of the playoffs.
And if the Browns didn't face the toughest schedule of all time this side of the Washington Generals, I'd like to see a tougher one. They must have felt a bit like the bottom 5 teams in the 1971 Big Eight Conference, when #1 Nebraska swept the table, #2 Oklahoma beat every team except Nebraska, #3 Colorado went undefeated against every team except those top two, and then they all won convincing bowl game victories.
I sure hope they asked the Chiefs themselves first. I mean, if they want to play, sure. But if the game is going to happen just because the NFL doesn't want to postpone or delay it, then shame on them.
It's because Tebow is out. Now it's just less of a circus.
They shown a few shots of Sanchez on the sidelines after he was benched. He even looked like he was relieved of playing QB.
But in the end... stupid option pitch on 3rd-and-3 from your own 20 up 8 with 3 minutes to go.
I'm convinced they are about as "good" as they were last year. Just won everything last year. Found a way to lose everything this year. It's pretty incredible.
Good for Charlie Batch today.
as for the thought of who might be the next head coach of the eagles, after seeing what bryce brown has done the last two weeks, i think i'm jumping on the chip kelly train. kelly's offense would seem to me to be the best way to get the most out of both brown and lesean mccoy. and while i could be wrong, i believe that kelly would be on board the howard-mudd-train as well, which isn't so important because of howard mudd, but because it would be nice to not lose another handful of quality lineman because of another switch in line coaches.
so, considering the eagles have two running backs who appear to be very good (mccoy and brown) and an offensive line that should be extremely athletic (figure some combination of peters, herremens, kelly and watkins at tackle, some combination of mathis, watkins, acott, or herremens at guard, and hopefully the return of jason kelce at center), it seems to me like the eagles' offensive personnel is kind of tailor-made for kelly's spread rushing attack. if he's the new coach, maybe the eagles draft an offensive lineman or a tight end or a quarterback, but other than that, every other pick the eagles have could be used on the defense.
so, i'll take him.
The defense is still stout as they had a very good game yesterday but anytime you have an inexperienced QB, you have to expect some growing pains.
nevermind that his unit has played like absolute #### despite having 3 guys pulling serious money (babin, cole, and jenkins) and 3 more who were picked in the first round (mike patterson, brandon graham, and fletcher cox).
i'm not gonna ##### about it because i'm happy it was done, but the lack of organizational discipline is both stunning and not at all surprising.
oh, and i don't know how many of you have ever followed a season like this, but my favorite part of the postgame interviews now is when every single player insists that this is still a good team. FOR ##### SAKE YOU'VE LOST 8 IN A ROW. STOP ####### TALKING ABOUT HOW ####### GOOD YOU ARE WHEN IT'S OBVIOUS THAT YOU'RE COMPLETE ####.
also, surprising as this may be to believe, at 220 lbs, bryce brown is the fastest eagles running back in the andy reid era. mccoy and westbrook had quickness and agility, but when brown gets a full head of steam going, he can run past people in ways that mccoy and westbrook really couldn't.
it's one half and once teams start testing him maybe he falls apart in pass protection
but you can tell he's a scrapper. that he is likes mixing it up with people
offensive linemen need a lot of skills to be successful but that's a good place to start
unless lang's injury is more serious than thought one would expect exactly that to happen for sunday's game against detroit
depending on how you believe the bears had about the 20th toughest schedule through 11 games.
i don't know if that qualifies as powderpuff but it does jibe with your overall sense that the bears played less than tough competition
I'd love to see their SoS through the first 8 games.
Watching the "Sunday Soundtrack" at the half drives home just how cultish most football teams are.
I'm a little in disbelief that there's no way to play something that looks like something in the history football without turning it into a bloodsport.
I mean, you're still going to have debilitating injury to the rest of the body (like a lot of other sports) -- its the head trauma that we're seeing as the real tragedy, right?
You mean that went together, and based on individual quality? I doubt it.
Just out of recent drafts Ovechkin and Malkin were 1 and 2 in 2004, that's 3 MVP's right there.
If I remember right, Elway and Eric Dickerson went 1 and 2. That would be a tall order.
All that said - that we can even have the conversation about them without laughing hysterically is pretty exciting.
The NFL version of this I assume would be the 1989 draft:
1. Troy Aikman
2. Tony Mandarich
3. Barry Sanders
4. Derrick Thomas
5. Deion Sanders
The defense is still stout as they had a very good game yesterday but anytime you have an inexperienced QB, you have to expect some growing pains.
Disagree re the defense. There's probably a way to find this out more accurately than rank speculation/exaggeration, but I wouldn't be surprised if you told me the Niners' D missed more tackles in the 2nd Rams game than in the rest of the season to date.
The playcall on the pitch wasn't anywhere near the biggest mistake/problem in that game:
1. Kaepernick not running out of bounds to burn the Rams' last TO
2. Kaepernick's safety (I don't care if some nerd says the LOS extends past the sideline, CK never should have been in the endzone throwing away to begin with; the LOS was the SEVENTEEN YARD LINE WHY ARE YOU IN THE END ZONE)
3. Harbaugh's (or Roman's) ludicrously conservative playcalling down the stretch (this is becoming a huge problem, and is EXACTLY how they failed to win the first Rams game; hard to believe run-run-run-50 yd FG was even still an OPTION, much less the approach they decided to go with)
4. Jackson breaking the first tackle and gaining several YAContact every time he touched the ball
5. Akers
6. The front seven failing to generate any consistent pressure in the 2nd half
7. Kapernick audibling out of a pass play and into a 1-yard run about half a dozen times over the course of the game
8. Kaepernick rushing the pitch
9. Ginn's lack of effort recovering the ball on the pitch
10. Calling the pitch play in the first place, which I actually think was a defensible idea.
And in terms of possibly losing the division, they've already been unlucky - Goodell already owes the Packers a win and Carroll a loss.
I am cautiously pessimistic.
Overall, I think it's total ########, since my guess is that part of the deal on a partial season is prorated salaries, not to mention there will end up being some sort of rollback on the existing contract numbers.
WAG: if no deal by 12/12/12, no NHL this year.
Few football plays are more boring than kickoff and punt returns. I skip past them with the 30-second advance button until I get to first down (and through the commercial). The only exception is a kickoff or punt return late in the 4th quarter of a close game.
Kickoff returns are spectacularly more boring than punt returns, although there are more touchbacks.
And it just leads to TD, commerical, extra point, commercial, kick-off, commercial. Wait, I just figured out the point.
Are you confounding the 1st and 2nd rams games? I think they missed maybe 3-4 tackles in the 2nd. Jackson was 21 for 48 yards with 1 9 yard run... unless he was breaking a lot of tackles 4 yards behind the LOS (he probably did break a couple).
I don't think this is fair either. I think they often call 2 runs in the huddle with the roll/kill call. Although I agree in GENERAL that they were either horribly misreading STL defense at the line, vastly optimistic about their OL, or tipping plays.
Yeah, that's why I DVR a game and fastforward straight on through the kickoffs and commercials, right to the next 1st down.
Even the FGs are not interesting before the 4th quarter. So he shanks one. Big deal, there's nothing really to see there.
Steve Stamkos
Drew Doughty
Again, this rule that the NHL only needs 6 (of 30!) owners to reject any proposal is the worst bylaw I have ever heard of. It guarantees this will happen every damn time.
11 - Manning
10 - Brady
9 - Montana
I looked back at Montana's career and was reminded that the 49ers were in a 4-team division all those years. 4 of the 6 divisions were 5-team divisions. So both the 21st-century players and Montana benefitted from that slight advantage over most potential division winners.
Not that it makes a huge difference, but he also had one with the Chiefs in a 5 team division.
Anyway, in order of who I'd choose. Keep in mind this is not whose career I'd choose if I were drafting a QB; it's simply "which QB was the greatest." I view that question as a combination of peak, prime, career, regular season, postseason, super bowl wins, QB record, QB rating. Some of the categories that are important to me are below.
Brady: 133-38 regular season record (.778), 16-6 in the playoffs, 96.9 rating, 3 SB wins (5 trips)
Montana: 117-47 regular season (.713), 16-7 playoffs, 92.3, 4 SB
Manning: 151-70 regular season (.684), 9-10 playoffs, 95.5, 1 SB
Young: 94-49 regular season (.657), 8-6 playoffs, 96.8, 1 SB
Elway: 148-82 regular season (.644), 14-7 playoffs, 79.9, 3 SB
Favre: 186-112 regular season (.624), 13-11 playoffs, 86.0, 1 SB
Marino: 147-93 regular season (.613), 8-10 playoffs, 86.4, 0 SB
Comments:
1. I don't really see a reasonable argument for anyone except Brady. Unless one argues that he hasn't gone through his decline phase yet, but my impression is that decline phases for NFL QBs are quite short, so I don't think it will matters much, and he's just so far ahead of everyone in total, and does extremely well in each of my categories. At the end of the day, his .778 "winning percentage" can't be ignored, and in the other categories he does great.
2. I struggled on where to place Young, given his short career. Ultimately I placed him over Elway due to peak.
3. Manning's pedestrian performance in the playoffs wasn't enough to knock him from the top 3, in my view.
4. I expected Marino to rank ahead of Favre, but I don't think he does.
Thoughts? Anyone else to add? Something I should be considering but am not?
You must have missed the last 7-8 years of this argument.
Why are we okay with using QB "wins" as a measurement of talent, but despise using pitcher "wins"?
Oh, and Elway only won 2 Super Bowls (in 5 appearances).
Different sport, different (and worse) ways to measure player effectiveness (because you don't have the individual pitcher/batter and fielder/ball matchups that you have in baseball), etc. I've said before that I really _do_ think an NFL quarterback wins and loses games all by himself, as long as the head coach lets him open up the field and do his thing, throw vertically, throw long, throw early and often, etc.
So that's why I'm more than ok with it.
Thanks. I was having trouble finding SB wins and appearances, so was going from memory. For some reason I thought Elway finished up with 3 SB wins in a row.
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