The Chicago Bears Have Made Loss History
And an examination of the Atlanta Falcons and whether it's better to miss the postseason by a lot or a little
The NFL discourse right now is locked into arguments about awesome things, like who should win Most Valuable Player or whether the Eagles are right to hold Saquon Barkley out of the regular season finale when he could break the single-season rushing record.
I, unfortunately, have a real fascination with things that are broken. This is why I enjoyed being an attorney (a real job I had, I know, it’s still weird), as a lot of that career was about examining systems or relationships that did not work the way they should have. Because of that fascination, I’m mashing up two small examinations here today - one about the Chicago Bears and their history-making loss column, and one about the almost-but-not-quite nature of the Atlanta Falcons.
Even if the Chicago Bears end the 2024 season by beating the Packers and finish 5-12, they will still find themselves in a historically unusual position, holding more losses than the rest of their division combined. (Green Bay would have six losses, and the Lions and Vikings, who play one another, would have a combined five.)
I say historically unusual because, while this has happened before, the only NFL teams who previously pulled this distinction off played in the league’s 14-game season era. Bluesky user @morsmortis helpfully pointed me to the others: the 1967 and 1968 Atlanta Falcons (who were still a new expansion team sharing a division with the LA Rams, Baltimore Colts, and San Francisco 49ers), the 1969 Bears, and the 1975 Cleveland Browns.
Part of what makes this so hard to do is the NFL’s division schedule. At the start, you are guaranteed six losses from the other three teams you call colleagues, in the six games they’ll play amongst themselves. You’ll also have six chances of your own to impact the math when you play your division mates. Win, say, two of those (not a particularly good outing) and you set up the following scenario:
You win no other games, and finish the year 2-15. Hooray draft season!
The other three teams, who have eight collective losses in the division, have to win 27 of their 33 games outside of it.
That ends up being a tricky proposition, as most divisions wind up with a third place team that’s, at minimum, mediocre.
Take the truly terrible teams you might recall. The winless Lions of 2008 didn’t come close to matching the rest of the division’s loss total, thanks in large part to the 6-10 Packers. The 0-16 Browns came close to matching the rest of the AFC North in 2017, but the Bengals went 7-9 and tipped the rest of the division to 19 cumulative losses.
Perhaps the most shocking miss was the 2007 AFC East, where the Dolphins finished 1-15 while the Patriots went 16-0. The Bills and Jets finished a combined 11-21, keeping Miami amazingly far from joining this list.
So how did the 2024 Bears pull this off? Seven one-score losses helped, three coming against division opponents in an eleven day span. But the trick about this accomplishment is you can’t really do it on your own.
Not including divisional games, the Packers are 4-1 in games decided by one score this season. The Vikings are 6-0. The Lions are 4-1. That’s a stupefying 14-2 in close contests; flip three of those results and the Bears are just Normal Bad, not Whoops Made History Bad.
The Atlanta Falcons probably* will not participate in this year’s postseason, extending a drought that goes back to 2017. Since then, only one Falcons team (the 2020 edition) has finished with a truly terrible record (4-12). The rest all won seven games, and this year Atlanta has eight wins and could finish with a ninth.
This raised two questions for me. First, is it better to just be kind of bad with a bunch of late eliminations from playoff contention, or should your team really bottom out when they won’t be contending for the Super Bowl to get better draft position?
Second, are the Falcons unusually adept at staying in this just-on-the-outside-looking-in position? To answer both, I pulled the win totals for every NFL franchise from 2000 through 2023 in the years they didn’t make the playoffs and then averaged them out for each team.
And it turns out the Falcons are…perfectly in the middle of this measure as well! The league average for wins in a non-playoff year across the stretch is 6.1; Atlanta floats slightly above that mark.
So is it better to be on the high end of this list or the low one? Most of the teams with the higher averages are playoff mainstays. The Steelers, Ravens, Seahawks, and Patriots have fewer than 10 seasons in this stretch where they’ve missed the postseason. That they win so many games even in “bad” years suggests these are well-built franchises equipped to contend almost all the time.
But then there’s New Orleans, with a whopping 13 years where they managed between seven and nine wins and no playoff appearance. The Saints haven’t drafted a player inside the top 10 since 2008, and if I tried to suggest it’s because they’re a super effective organization I would be beaten to death by salary cap experts.
On the low end, you have some of the traditional dregs of the NFL in the Jaguars, Browns, and Lions (NOT THIS YEAR STOP THROWING THINGS AT ME) and two teams that flipped a lot of draft capital into deep postseason runs in the Rams and Niners. I’m not going to engage with the Raiders, and you cannot make me.
When Cleveland, Jacksonville, and Detroit miss the playoffs, they tend to do so without much fretting; each has at least 11 seasons where they failed to win more than five games. Reflecting on what those teams have done with all the sweet draft treasure this struggle has handed them, I can’t really recommend this as the better alternative.
These numbers lead me to speculate that tanking isn’t that useful in the NFL. If you can think about throwing in the towel to get better draft positioning, you’re probably bad enough that it won’t fix things in one year.
And, perhaps more crucially, if you’re good enough to benefit from adding one special player, you’re probably in playoff contention too late to actually consider tanking. Let me illustrate by using our Falcons as an example.
Entering Week 11 of the 2023 season, the Falcons had lost three straight games and found themselves stuck at 4-6. Say, at that point, Atlanta’s front office just loved Jayden Daniels and decided to tank the season. They would face two problems (well, far more than two, but two to focus on).
The Falcons sat one game out of the NFC South lead and had not played either of their two matchups against the 5-5 New Orleans Saints, and they were only two games out of a theoretical Wild Card spot.
Eight teams at that point had a worse record than the Falcons.
To truly tank at this point would require you to throw away a decent shot at a playoff spot in the hopes that you’d out-lose a quarter of the league!
So I’m forced to conclude that, even as they bumble away chance after chance to get back to the postseason, the Falcons are doing the right thing by not being more like the Cleveland Browns.
I know, revolutionary stuff over here.
*Technically the Falcons are not dead; if Atlanta wins and the Saints beat the Bucs, the drought is over. Please blame my assumption on sharing an office with Steven Godfrey.