The 2020 Jets are five games away from history. Maybe not the history the players and coaches will choose to remember fondly, but there is a certain achievement in going 0-16. For better or worse, people will remember a team that went 0-16. It's like when they say that any publicity is good publicity. There is often that point in time where our greatest follies turn from sad to humorous. Heck, Bill Buckner starred in an entire episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm written to poke fun at his infamous groundball error in the 1986 World Series.
Alas, we are not ready to start guest booking Adam Gase on any national sitcoms yet. However, I did think it would be interesting to see how the 2020 Jets were pacing compared to all teams in history (and specifically the two other 0-16 teams, the 2008 Lions and 2016 Browns). I pulled in all NFL teams since the 2002 realignment and looked at their cumulative point differential by week, through week 12 (where the 2020 season is through). Here is a look at the PDs for all 608 teams in the dataset (the 2020 teams are highlighted in blue):
It doesn't take a rocket scientist to know who that blue line at the bottom is. With a PD of -170, the Jets have been far and away the worst team in the NFL this season. The two nearest teams this season have been the Dallas Cowboys (-108) and Jacksonville Jaguars (-98). To put that in context, the Jets have been about a touchdown per game worse than the next worst team. Yet, there is a silver lining. They are not the worst Week 12 team since 2002. They are actually only the fifth worst. Let's zoom in on that a bit:
The worst team as of Week 12 since 2002 was the 2008 St. Louis Rams with a PD of -197. That same year, the Detroit Lions sat at -153. Yet it was the Lions who eventually went 0-16, while the Rams finished 2-14 (although perhaps even more impressively, the Rams two wins had already happened by Week 12). This does show that while PD is a highly predictive measure of the overall strength of a team, it can still suffer from randomness on the final win-loss record. The Jets "lead" the Jaguars by 72 points this season, yet are just one game ahead of them in the race for the first overall pick.
While the Jets aren't the worst team in the dataset, they are pacing ahead of the two winless teams. However, you wouldn't even need to look that far back to see an example of a team that stopped the bleeding after Week 12. The 2019 Miami Dolphins' PD sat at -183 at this time last year, which is worse than the Jets now, but they finished the season at -188. They managed to be outscored by five points in their last five games after losing by more than 15 per game in their first 12. The flip side is that things can also get worse. The 2008 Lions lost by 96 points in their last five to finish at -249 (the Rams finished at "only" -233).
On the other side of the horizon, there is no real history being threatened by any of the NFLs best teams this year. The Pittsburgh Steelers lead the NFL with a 129 PD with the Kansas City Chiefs behind at 110. This only puts Pittsburgh as the 23rd best team since 2002 and the Chiefs 37th. Good teams but far from historically good.
But I really wanted to show this chart to marvel at the 2007 New England Patriots. Their 257 PD as of Week 12 dwarfs the next beat team (2009 New Orleans Saints) by 71 points! They were literally averaging a margin of victory of nearly four touchdowns per game. They only had two games in their first 11 where they won by less than 21. How insane is a PD of 257 by Week 12? No other team has ever eclipsed it even in a full season! Only one other team has even eclipsed 230 points.
Point differentials do also show the randomness of win-loss records. The 2019 Dolphins finished 5-11 with a PD of -188, which was the exact same PD of the 0-16 Browns of 2016. Those juggernaut 2007 Patriots went undefeated at 16-0. The Pittsburgh Steelers at 11-0 are five wins away from joining them, despite being at half the PD at the same point in time. That's just the random walk that the NFL can often be.
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