The Indianapolis Colts were 2022’s least competitive NFL team. After firing Frank Reich and hiring former player Jeff Saturday — a man with zero coaching experience above the high school level — the Colts’ 4-12-1 came with a -138 point differential, worst among the league’s 32 teams.
The New York Giants have only played 10 games. Their point differential is a stunning -148. That’s not quite on pace to make history as the least competitive team of the NFL’s modern era, but it’s enough to make this dubious achievement possible.
Since 1970, the season that joined the NFL and AFL as one, there have been 42 teams (excluding teams in strike-affected seasons) to have had an average weekly margin of victory of negative-12 points or worse — i.e. you take points scored, subtract points allowed and divide that by the number of games played and you get negative-12 or lower. As it stands, the Giants’ 14.8-point average deficit per game only ranks 14th among them but remains the worst since 2009.
This is bad, but I believe in the Giants’ capacity to be even worse. New York has the bones to not only break into the top 10, but usurp the league’s post-2000 high-water mark for futility; the 2008 Detroit Lions.
You’re likely familiar with those 2008 Lions, even if you never watched a game. They were the first 0-16 team in NFL history. They had second-year Calvin Johnson and rookie Cliff Avril and basically no one else you’d remember fondly. Their sigil was a panicked Dan Orlovsky, years before constantly expressing terrible opinions on Twitter, running away from Jared Allen and out the back of his own end zone.
These 2023 New York Giants? They have Saquon Barkley and Dexter Lawrence. They had Daniel Jones and Leonard Williams, but the former is out for the rest of the season and the latter was freed from football hell when he was traded to the Seattle Seahawks. Their current quarterback is Tommy DeVito, an undrafted rookie free agent who began the season as the team’s third-string quarterback and has been outscored 79-23 in the first two starts of his NFL career.
The schedule over the back end of the schedule isn’t intimidating. Next week brings a game against a Washington Commanders team Tyrod Taylor beat 14-7 in Week 7. Half of New York’s six opponents after that have three wins or fewer after Week 10. The Giants may not only be competitive in these games, but could even win them.
Buuuuut, this is also a team that faced a then 3-5 Las Vegas Raiders team led by fourth-round rookie Aidan O’Connell and an interim head coach and lost 30-6. It managed negative-nine net passing yards in a Week 8 loss to the New York Jets. There are several bad teams in the Giants’ sights, and New York may be significantly worse than all of them.
How bad would they have to be to set varying stages of NFL futility records? Oh, friends, I’m glad you asked.