Since 1968, at least…
Arz
Det
NO
Cle
Formerly, TB
What’s the deal?
I don’t know why you would include Cleveland, at least not if you are going back to 1968, since they made the playoffs in 1968 and 1969 and many times thereafter until Art Modell decided to move the team to Baltimore in 1996. Their lack of success since returning is due in large part to being an expansion team and trying to compete in a division dominated by the Pittsburgh Steelers for the past 35 years.
I agree Detroit does not seem to have had much success over the years, but they have had some serious bad luck with injuries, Billy Sims for one comes to mind. They were the team, though in the late 50’s and early 60’s until Vince Lombardi took over the Packers.
Arizona, via St. Louis and Chicago, has also had little success and the blame is usually placed entirely on the Bidwill family who owned it most of that time.
New Orleans - who knows? They were an expansion team long ago but they should have accomplished something in all that time.
The most successful teams though seem to be those who have the least coaching turnover, maybe it is luck in picking a great coach or maybe it is just that continuity and/or the knowledge that the coach will be back next year whether you the player are back or not causes improved perfomance.
The fact is that with 32 teams there is going to be a lot of failure.
No Super Bowl appearances as the Cleveland Browns.
All of the teams listed above have made the playoffs at one time or another.
Well I might not have quibbled but the Browns were great in 68 and 69 and awful darn good in some other years with Kozar and Bryan Sipe. Actually I was reading up on Detroit and they made the playoffs 6 out of 10 years at one stretch and might have had a better history had they been able to convince barry Sanders to stay. It really seems like Arizona and New Orleans are the real lumps over the years. It seems really unfair to demand a Super Bowl paticipant given the number of teams in the mix.
The one I don’t get is Arizona- say what you want about the owners, and I have no idea what went on in the past, but for the last several years at least they have spent money, brought in big name players and coaches, and still stink. I seriously believe if you uprooted the entire current Patriots team and staff and made them the Arizona Cardinals, they would go 7-9.
Making the Super Bowl and losing isn’t anything to brag about. IMHO the Viking, Bengals, Bills, Oilers-Titans, Falcons, Seahawks, Chargers and Jets belong on the post 1968 losers list as well, and there’s no good reason to leave the Chiefs off either because their Super Bowl IV win is as ancient history as the Browns’ success in the 60s under Blanton Collier.
As the one Arizona Cardinals fan on this board, I’ll try to help with this.
The Cards have been building a team over the past few years. I think moving to a real pro stadium last year helped a lot. We’ve started building a team by adding Boldin, then Fitzgerald, then Leinart. Signing Kurt Warner was supposed to be a stopgap until a new QB was ready. McCown didn’t work out and Leinart was drafted.
This year’s Cards team is a young team, but is better than any Cards team has looked in a long time. They’re not quitting. They lost the SF game in the last 20 seconds and the Baltimore game in the last second. It’s still a young team, but I was impressed how they came back against Baltimore rather than just give up. The NFC West is a weak divisision and the Cards could still win that division.
Wow, so your the Other Cards fan! Nice to meet you.
Arizona is having some growing pains. The addition of Whiz and Grimm have been the best addition so far. This year, Edge has been running the ball, better than most people realize. He is 6th in the league right now and 2nd in the NFL. Lienart is having problems adjusting to the pro game.
Arizona has a good chance to win the devision due to the teams there.
Osip
The Jets have never lost a Superbowl; they’re 1-0.
More than that, the NFL deliberately set them up to fail, for two reasons.
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They were embarassed by the immediate success of the Carolina Panthers and Jacksonville Jaguars (both made the conference championship in their 2nd season IIRC), so they changed the expansion rules to be far more crippling to new expansion teams
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The NFL wanted to try to blackmail certain cities into building a new stadium, so they delayed giving Cleveland an expansion franchise under the threat that they’d pressure owners to move their team to Cleveland unless public money was once again used to line NFL pockets. The delay was ridiculously long, and the new owner of the franchise only had a matter of months to select a front office, a coaching staff, a scouting department, build training facilities, etc. The franchise was set back with a poor scouting department and bad GM that lead to bad drafting, a bad coaching staff, castoff players from the new expansion rules, etc.
Of course poor decisions were made years later, too - but the franchise had a huge hole to dig itself out of from the very start.
The 1968-1995 Cleveland Browns don’t belong in the same category of suck as the Saints, Lions, Cardinals, etc. They had a whole lot more winning seasons, and were quite close to a superbowl many times, mostly thwarted by a certain horse faced bastard.
You might be better off comparing the number of winning seasons, rather than superbowl appearances.
It’s simply inevitable that some teams will be more successful than others merely by chance; if you simulated 40 years of the NFL with nothing but coin flips, you’d have some teams win the Super Bowl multiple times and some not win it at all. Just having three or four teams run by genuinely superior management - e,g. giving the Steelers, Cowboys, 49ers and Raiders an advantage - will warp the numbers even more.
As a WAG, I would say it is primarily a result of the owners motivation for owning a team: do you want a champion, or do you want steady positive cash flow? While it’s not impossible to do both, the NFL revenue-sharing structure allows do-nothing teams that suck royal ass to still make money.
IMHO, of course.
I’m the third Cardinals fan. Holy shit… what are the odds their entire fanbase would be on the dope?
AZ has buttloads of talents at key positions, but very little depth. Any of their stars go down and they’ll struggle even more. Most of their problems are attributable to the inept ownership and management they’ve had over the years, but I think with the new stadium revenue and old man Bidwill stepping out of the way for his son to take over bodes well for the organization becoming more competitive. The same thing happened to my other team, the Colts. Once the old man croaked, Jim Irsay put together a top notch management team that could assemble talent. Look where the Colts are now. I hope that’s the pattern AZ is able to follow. They’ve got a good start with Whisenhunt & Grimm.
What has not changed for the NFL Cardinals over the past 45 years? Not the coach, the players, even the city. Only one thing has remained the same through this stretch of suckitude, and its name is Bill Bidwell.
This reminds me of when Sports Illustrated named the Clippers the Worst Sports Franchise Ever on the cover, and plainly laid the blame at the feet of Donald Sterling. It was richly deserved, and only marginally not better used for the Cardinals.
I would have loved for them to succeed when I was little in STL, but alas, not even the real STL love succeeded then. But I remain remunerated since…
NBA owner Donald Sterling of the Clippers was known for this- shitty teams for years, but he made a profit.
I’d say ESPN nailed most of the problems with the underachievers, namely the owners. For this thread:
“1. Art Modell, Cleveland Browns: For all the dark days that Cleveland sports fans have had to endure, none was more painful than Jan. 28, 2001. On that day, Modell held up the Lombardi trophy for the Baltimore Ravens’ victory in Super Bowl XXXV. All Modell did leading up to that point was run the franchise’s architect (Paul Brown) and the best player in Cleveland history (Jim Brown) out of town, fudge stadium accounting data and turn one of the most successful franchises in sports into a perennial loser. All the while, Browns fans continued to rabidly support their team. Hatching a secret plan to move the team to Baltimore instead of selling to local interests who’d keep the Browns in Cleveland was merely the final indignity.”
“7. Bill Bidwill, St. Louis and Arizona Cardinals: Forty-five years of ownership, one playoff win. The Cardinals might be the single worst franchise in all of pro sports.”
“8. William Clay Ford, Detroit Lions: Forty-three years of ownership, one playoff win. In 2001, Ford was attacked by a band of marauding zombies, who subsequently ate his brain. In related news, Matt Millen has been the Lions’ president and CEO ever since.”
“24. Tom Benson, New Orleans Saints: After years of attempting to relocate the team, Benson tried to use Hurricane Katrina as a final excuse to move the team. Class act.”
Of course, the GMs of the teams didn’t help either.
Ellis, while the Jets have indeed won one prehistoric super bowl, you will have to agree that they haven’t won anything lately, or indeed since the NFL-AFL merger. The OP was referring to post 1968 teams, and of course the Jets one SB victory and appearance was during the 1968 season. The NYJets have to appear on any list of currently long-standing stinky teams.
I think ESPN is way out of line for labeling the Saints owner as a bad guy for still wanting to move the team, like it is his personal obligation to stay in New Orleans after an event that clearly will hurt his income. No one is stopping any other business owner from moving to another town if they lose money, and if the NFL is so stuck on the morality of keeping a team in New Orleans, they can always grant them an expansion team any time they want.
In the years since the merger, the two franchises that have stood out as being uniformly poor are the Lions and the Cardinals. They manage an occasional playoff appearance, but they essentially never win. They’ve never even really sniffed the Super Bowl. They often have poor seaons (especially the Cardinals). I’d rank the Cardinals as the worst of the worst, since they have even tried moving cities (and you will note that the team that replaced them in St. Louis managed to have success there, so it certainly wasn’t a “small market” issue).
I think that the Saints can be forgiven a bit since they were an expansion team in the late '60s, as opposed to both the Cardinals and the Lions, which have long histories. They do seem to manage to underacheive a bit, though. The Browns don’t belong on the list because the current Browns are not the old Browns, and the Ravens, who are the old Browns, continue their winning ways, including a win at the big dance.
Atlanta’s winning percentage is actually worse than the Cardinals’, and comparable with New Orleans’. But, even at the start, they served notice they were willing to do what they needed at times to get where they wanted. That’s why they occasionally succeed at their efforts.
[QUOTE=asterion]
I’d say ESPN nailed most of the problems with the underachievers, namely the owners. For this thread:
“24. Tom Benson, New Orleans Saints: After years of attempting to relocate the team, Benson tried to use Hurricane Katrina as a final excuse to move the team. Class act.”
QUOTE]
Well, to be fair, didn’t Benson buy the team to keep it from being moved out of new orleans? And John Mecom the owner for the first 17 years had very little success also. I would certainly rate him higher than Modell, Bidwill and the Irsays from a loyalty standpoint. It really isn’t always the owner. The Pittsburgh Steelers were the worst franchise in the NFL for the first 30-odd years of their existence, with the same family ownership they have today. They were the team that cut John Unitas, a Pittsburgh native in order to keep Ted Marchibroda, they could find no way to succeed with Len Dawson, a future HOF quarterback. But with one lucky choice for head coach they became the most successful NFL team of the 70’s and one of the most successful ever. I have no doubt that the Rooneys would move the team in a heartbeat if Pittsburgh ever stopped supporting the team in the manner to which they have become accustomed.