NFC LEast

 

Tonight we’re going to see the latest in a long line of legendary Thursday Night Football matchups. Two bitter division rivals clash as the New York Giants head to Philadelphia to face the Eagles. Both teams still trail Dallas for the division lead, but they are less than a game back, and this early season collision could go a long way to determining which of these teams is a contender going forward.

Obviously, I’m being a bit sarcastic. I’ll be watching this game, but I couldn’t recommend that anyone else do the same, as two of the NFL’s worst teams stumble together for another ugly football contest.

Everything I said in the first paragraph is true though. Both teams are very much still alive in the division race, thanks to the utter ineptitude of the NFC East. It was a bad division a year ago, and it has somehow gotten even worse this year, as young players have failed to develop, established stars have gotten hurt, and just about everything that could go wrong has gone wrong.

We know that the NFC East is bad. But this of course raises the question, just how bad is it? It certainly feels like this particular season is unusual. Through six weeks these four teams have combined to go 5-18-1, for a winning percentage of 23% (assuming you count a tie as half a win, which I am going to do from this point forward). Of course, three of these wins have come in games within the division, where someone has to get a victory. So if we subtract three out from both their wins and their losses, they have a winning percentage of only 14% against the rest of the league.

This seems like a prime opportunity to pour through the data. My plan was to look back at every season to 2002, the first year the league went to its current format with eight divisions of four teams (can you believe the Houston Texans are old enough to vote?) But sometime after I scraped the data going back to 2009, Pro Football Reference added a paywall to their game search data. I’m sure I’ll give in and pay the $8 a month eventually, but for now I’ll stick with the 11 years I have available.

I looked through each division at the six week point in the season and picked the worst from each year, to see how they fared six weeks into the season and how they finished things off.

The short answer is, yes this division is a special sort of terrible. They aren’t even close to the worst divisions of previous years. No previous worst division won less than 30% of their games through the first six weeks, and even when you strip out in-division wins, no other division has been below 20%. The NFC East would have had to find two more wins somewhere just to get up to utterly incompetent.

If there’s good news to be found, it’s that the worst division through six weeks doesn’t always mean that much in the grand scheme of things. In only 4 of the 11 years I looked at was the worst division at the end of the year the same as the worst division through six weeks. Overall a division’s winning percentage through the first six weeks only had a correlation of 19% with their winning percentage the remainder of the season.

(That correlation jumps to 67% if you compare their winning percentage through the first six weeks with their full-season winning percentage, which makes sense since those first six weeks are part of the full season. I’m mostly including this number for later reference.)

Of course, wins and losses aren’t the only way to judge teams. Sometimes good teams catch some bad luck due to strength of schedule or bad breaks in close games. That isn’t the case with the NFC East this year. These teams represent four of the bottom seven in the league in DVOA, a metric that looks at play-by-play success and adjusts for strength of competition. I was able to find weekly DVOA going back to 2004. Here was how things stacked up in each of those seasons.

Once again, we see that this year’s NFC East is truly something special. No division had an average DVOA rank worse than 25 through six weeks in the season. The NFC East is far below that at 28.5. They would need the Cowboys to jump up to the 12^th best team by DVOA just to match the historic bottom. Currently the 12^th ranked team by DVOA is Green Bay.

Things are actually a little closer when you look at the DVOA score, which is measured as percentage above or below average. The 2020 NFC East is 23% worse than average—again the worst among the years in our sample, but there have actually been a few divisions in the past that have come close to this. The 2013 AFC South was dragged down by three teams—Indianapolis, Tennessee, and Jacksonville—with DVOAs below -30%. Jacksonville alone did them in in 2013, with a DVOA of -66%. And San Francisco sank the NFC West in 2005 with an astounding -71%. For comparison, no one in this year’s NFC East is below -28%. The worst team this year is obviously the Jets, and even they are only at -41%.

(It’s possible that some of the DVOA calculations may have changed and not been applied retroactively, dampening the results. Though the worst week 6 DVOA in the entire sample belongs to the 2019 Miami Dolphins at -84%, so they can’t have shifted things too much.)

Another interesting thing to note from this table is that things generally seem a lot more stable. Where the table based on winning percentage never had the same division in two straight years, the DVOA table picks out the same division through six weeks in consecutive seasons on a regular basis. The NFC West “won” four out of five years from 2007-2011, which pretty well matches up with what I remember from that period. The AFC South followed that with a historic streak of five straight seasons, which again checks out.

DVOA also seems a bit better at identifying which division will be the weakest at the end of the year. In 9 of the 16 seasons in my sample the two were the same (and 6 of the 11 where it overlaps with the sample based on records). And while generally the divisions’ DVOAs reverted towards average as the season went along, it was not super dramatic. The correlation between 6 week DVOA and full season DVOA was 78%, even higher than the 67% number I gave above.

There may be reasons to expect this year’s NFC East to get better. First of all, it can’t really get worse. There are a pair of young teams with new head coaches in Washington and New York that should improve as the season goes along. Philadelphia should get healthier on offense, and Dallas…well I don’t really have any reason for optimism for Dallas. But at this point though, the 2020 NFC East has dug themselves a hole unlike any other division in recent history. Only time will tell if they are as uniquely terrible as they appear to be right now.