8. Denver Broncos (87-70)
After a Hall of Fame career as the Broncos’ quarterback from 1983 through 1998, John Elway made his way to the franchise’s front office in 2011 as the director of player personnel — a position that eventually morphed into the wordier and more comprehensive executive VP of football operations/general manager title. In that time, Elway has made a large number of quarterback decisions — and exactly one of those has worked out in the team’s favor. Signing Peyton Manning in 2012 gave Denver the league’s most prolific offense for a time, and Elway’s draft acumen helped build a defense that dominated the Panthers in Super Bowl 50. But the quarterback decisions after Manning’s retirement — from Paxton Lynch to Trevor Siemian to Brock Osweiler to Case Keenum to Joe Flacco to Brandon Allen — have been the obvious Achilles heel that has kept Denver out of the postseason ever since. Drew Lock, a 2019 second-round draft pick out of Missouri, might be the answer Elway’s been looking for based on a small sample size, and Elway had better hope so.
7. Kansas City Chiefs (93-64)
The Chiefs clinched their fourth consecutive AFC West title with their 23-16 Week 14 win over the Patriots, and that win brought Andy Reid’s record in Kansas City to 74-35 in the regular season over the past seven years. The 2-5 postseason record is a bit harder to swallow, especially with the knowledge that Reid’s team was agonizingly close to beating New England in last season’s AFC Championship Game and perhaps giving Reid his first Super Bowl title. But it’s still Reid that took over a 2-14 mess after the 2012 season, and he’s never had a losing season in Kansas City with Alex Smith and Patrick Mahomes as his main quarterbacks. This season, while Mahomes has been limited by injuries and hasn’t shown his 2018 MVP form, the defense is stronger — which could get Reid where he ultimately wants to go if Mahomes can get back on track.
6. New Orleans Saints (97-60)
Sean Payton and Drew Brees have been one of the most remarkable head coach/quarterback duos in NFL history, and the Saints would have been even more remarkable in the 2010s if they’d been able to put a half-decent defense on the field when Brees was dealing dimes like nobody else. From 2014 through 2016, Brees led the NFL in pass attempts (1,959), completions (1,355) and passing yards (15,030), and only Aaron Rodgers had more touchdown passes than Brees’ 102. But the Saints went 7-9 in each of those three seasons because their defenses ranked 28th, 32nd and 31st in points allowed. Now, although Brees doesn’t have quite the same zip on his passes, the defense has become formidable enough to make the Saints contenders for the Super Bowl since 2017, heartbreaking playoff losses aside.
5. Baltimore Ravens (95-62)
Bookended between a 2012 postseason in which Joe Flacco threw 11 touchdown passes without an interception and was named the Most Valuable Player in Baltimore’s Super Bowl XLVII win over the 49ers and Lamar Jackson’s current dominance that could lead to a similar Super Bowl win were several average seasons from Flacco and a defensive regression in which the Ravens missed the playoffs from 2015 through 2017. Flacco’s injuries and ineffectiveness led to Jackson’s ascent as a rookie 2018, and now Baltimore stands as the AFC’s top seed with an offense that looks very much like the 49ers unit the Ravens beat in that Super Bowl. The constant has been head coach John Harbaugh, who’s compiled a 115-74 regular-season record and a 10-6 postseason mark since he replaced Brian Billick in 2008.
4. Green Bay Packers (99-56-2)
The real question about the Packers in the 2010s is not whether they were successful — with a Super Bowl win at the end of the 2010 season, seven straight postseason campaigns from 2010 through 2016 and the fourth-best record of the decade, Green Bay’s success is undisputed. The schism, though, is how much better the franchise might have been if head coach and offensive play-designer Mike McCarthy hadn’t wasted some of the best seasons by Aaron Rodgers — perhaps the most physically gifted passer in NFL history — at the altar of a regressive playbook that gave Rodgers too much responsibility and not enough help. To imagine Rodgers with a coach such as Bill Belichick, Kyle Shanahan or Sean Payton is to imagine an alternate history of the 2010s in which Rodgers is the guy no defense can beat.
3. Pittsburgh Steelers (102-54-1)
With Pittsburgh’s win over the Cardinals in Week 14, the Steelers moved to 8-5 this season and guaranteed that head coach Mike Tomlin would keep his 13-year streak without a losing season intact. Tomlin has one Super Bowl win and two appearances to his credit, but perhaps his most impressive coaching job has been in 2019, when Ben Roethlisberger was lost to an elbow injury early in the season, and the team has had to alternate between Mason Rudolph and Devlin “Duck” Hodges. The only real deviation from success came with consecutive 8-8 seasons in 2012 and 2013, but that was part of a necessary rebuild that has kept the team in good stead for the most part. It’s hilarious that some Steelers fans want Tomlin replaced; he’s put himself on a Hall of Fame career path, and he’s never rested on his laurels.
2. Seattle Seahawks (99-57-1)
When Pete Carroll replaced Jim L. Mora as Seattle’s head coach in 2010, few people were excited about the move. Carroll failed as head coach of the Jets and Patriots in the 1990s, and although he was tremendously successful at USC through the first decade of the millennium, there was reason to think of Carroll as another coach whose ceiling was the NCAA. But Carroll had taken the time to audit his mistakes, and he wasn’t about to make them again. So Carroll, general manager John Schneider and an amazing scouting staff put together the best defense of the 2000s (argue if you like, but Seattle led the NFL in scoring defense each year from 2012 through 2015), and got the draft steal of the decade with the No. 75 overall selection of Russell Wilson in the 2012 draft. The Seahawks won Super Bowl XLVIII at the end of the 2013 season and were one horrific play call from a repeat the next season. Most of Carroll’s rosters have flipped, but there’s one thing he brought from his college days — a rare ability to replace talent with talent.
1. New England Patriots (123-34-0)
Who else would be at the top of this list? There have been scandals to be sure (and there’s another one as we speak), but no other NFL team has been nearly as successful as Bill Belichick’s Patriots through the 2010s. A sampling:
- A streak of seasons with at least 10 wins that goes back to 2003
- Five Super Bowl appearances since 2011, with three wins
- An offense that has ranked higher than 10th in the league in scoring every year since 2005 — and in the top three seven times since 2010
- A defense that has ranked first in points allowed twice (2016, 2019)
New England’s offense has been a problem this season, but it says a lot about Belichick and Tom Brady that the rest of the league is on tenterhooks, waiting for them to figure it out as they always seem to do. The most remarkable run of success in NFL history also has defined the NFL’s most recent decade.
Touchdown Wire editor Doug Farrar previously covered football for Yahoo! Sports, Sports Illustrated, Bleacher Report, the Washington Post, and Football Outsiders. His first book, “The Genius of Desperation,” a schematic history of professional football, was published by Triumph Books in 2018 and won the Professional Football Researchers Association’s Nelson Ross Award for “Outstanding recent achievement in pro football research and historiography.”