The 2007 Miami Dolphins are attempting what no other non-expansion team has accomplished since the 1940’s – have a season unmitigated in its futility. Just how bad does a team have to be to go winless/un-tied? It actually has to be put together without a chance to win.
Truly remarkable is this Dolphins season for the fact that the only team that has managed a “perfect” season in the loss column in the modern history in the NFL was essentially created to lose, and the only other teams that managed the feat were struggling to field teams in the midst of World War II.
The 1976 Tampa Bay Buccaneers are widely regarded as the worst team in NFL history – or at least the modern history of the league. They took the field for the first time in 1976, didn’t score until their third game, and didn’t win until their 13th game in the 1977 season.
The only other teams in the “modern history” of the NFL that come close for futility is the 1982 Baltimore Colts, which went 0-8-1 and the 1960 Dallas Cowboys which went 0-11-1 in their first year. Those teams at least played to one draw.
You have to go back to the 1940’s to find winless teams without a tie – the 1942 Detroit Lions, 1943 Chicago Cardinals, and the 1944 hybrid Cardinals/Steelers all went “oh fer.” The Cardinals and Steelers merged due to a lack of funds and a lack of players due to the War.
The 1960 Cowboys was stocked by 36 players made available from the other 12 NFL teams. The 1961 Vikings went 3-11 and won their first game.
The performance of the Buccaneers (2-26) in their first two seasons, however, lead to the league reforming the rules of expansion. At the time, the two expansion teams – the Seahawks were the other – had the expansion draft from which to draw players. They each drafted 39 players from the other 26 teams – alternating selections from the players teams had left exposed, and with each selection from a team, that team was allowed to protect 2 more players. In the end, each of the existing teams had 3 players chosen.
The Seahawks, which entered the league at the same time as the Bucs and won their first game in franchise history against the Buccaneers, and then only on a blocked field goal – finished 1976 at 2-12, but improved to 5-12 in 1977 faring somewhat better than their counterparts.
Each team, then, was selecting those players that their current team viewed as expendable and willing to cast off. Not a recipe for the success of the expansion teams for a league desiring competitive balance.
When next the NFL held an expansion draft – 1995 – the NFL required the existing teams to make 6 players available and as a player was selected from their ranks, the existing team would protect another player. The new franchises – the Jacksonville Jaguars and Carolina Panthers – had to chose no fewer than 30, but no more than 42 from this draft. In 2002 when the Houston Texans joined the NFL, each team had to expose 5 players, from which they were allowed to put forth a player who spent the previous season on injured reserve and one player who had more than 10 years. The Texans, too, were required to choose between 30 and 42 players, OR fewer if those players made up 38 percent of the salary cap.
The League was very interested in preventing the catastrophe of the ’76 Buccaneers from happening again. The 1995 Panthers went 7-9 (after losing their first 5 games, they went on a 4 game winning streak), the 1995 Jaguars and the 2002 Texans both went 4-12.
A mark of historic proportions a winless/no-tie season. To be this bad, teams have to be created bad or be facing historic circumstances, and even then, history suggests not all teams that have the deck stacked against them fail to even tie a game. It would seem, then, that the 2007 edition of the Dolphins were deliberately fielded to be bad.
REFERENCE MATERIAL:
1976 Expansion Draft, Pro Football Hall of Fame, URL: http://profootballhof.com/history/release.jsp?release_id=1284
2002 Expansion Draft, profootball weekly, URL: http://archive.profootballweekly.com/content/archives2001/features_2001/expansion_draftlist.asp
Dallas Cowboys, URL: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dallas_Cowboys
