Dynasties!

I adapted an old Bill James idea for measuring team success to football.  I assigned each of the following accomplishments one point:

• A .600 winning percentage during the regular season
• A .700 winning percentage during the regular season
• Getting to the conference championship game
• Winning the conference championship game
• Winning the Super Bowl

So a perfect score would be 5, for winning the Super Bowl as well 70% of your regular-season games, and in fact most championship teams do just that.  I then added up the points for each team in the Super Bowl era.  (This is admittedly a bit unfair to teams whose greatest success was before that, like the Bears of the 30s and the Browns of the 50s.)

During this period, the top ten teams have been:

• Cowboys, 76 points
• Steelers, 65 points
• 49ers, 63 points
• Raiders, 57 points
• Dolphins, 49 points
• Patriots, 48 points
• Colts, 47 points
• Rams, 46 points
• Broncos, 43 points
• Packers, 41 points

If there’s a surprise there, it’s the Rams.  10 of their points come from the two Kurt Warner Super Bowls, but the majority come from being a solid if unspectacular team during the 60s and 70s.   No team has been a consistent power throughout.  The top teams have had more than one run, for instance the Staubach-led Cowboys of the 70s and the much briefer peak of the Aikman/Smith/Irvin Cowboys of the early 90s.  The Raiders earned almost of their points early, up through the Jim Plunkett Super Bowls, and then had a brief resurgence under Jon Gruden, but don’t have one since Tampa Bay clobbered them.  The 49ers earned almost all of theirs during the Montana/Young era, but seem to be back on track.

The bottom 10 teams (not counting the most recent expansion teams) are

• Jaguars, 9
• Lions, 10
• Panthers, 10
• Buccaneers, 12
• Cardinals, 12
• Seahawks, 13
• Falcons, 15
• Saints, 15
• Bengals, 19
• Browns, 20

No surprises there at all.   If you’re a Browns fan and want to feel even worse, the Ravens have managed the same 20 points in 18 years that have taken you 47.

The other thing I looked at was the best 5-year run for each team.  The maximum possible score would be 25, and of course there were none of those.  In fact, no team cracked 20.  The scores (and years) are:

Obviously, the five year limit is arbitrary and creates some distortions.  At the top, for instance, Pittsburgh’s sixth year would be another 5-point championship  while Dallas’s would be a 1-pointer.    There has simply never been anything like the Steelers’ four Super Bowls in six years.  But this table does give us a good idea of which teams have been dominant and when.  The Bills and Vikings both had great runs going to the Super Bowl four times, even if they never won it.  The Browns and Jets have had very limited success, and not even that since the early ’70s.  The Falcons and Saints haven’t done much better, but they’re at their best now.

Let’s try to go for longer-term success.  A measure of consistency I just made up out of whole cloth is in how many consecutive years a five-year period totals double digits.  Let’s say that five or more constitute a true dynasty.  The results are:

Note that while both the Patriots and Steelers streaks are both ongoing, only that Patriots have enough points over the last four years to guarantee theirs will continue.

I think that if we define “dynasty” as a team that has great success over a period of years, rather than as one that necessarily wins lots of championships, this last table does pretty well.  Once again the biggest surprise is the Rams, who only went to one Super Bowl and lost that, but whose regular-season record over the time in question was  92-38-2, (.705), although their playoff record was only 6-8.