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.
For the New York Giants to be one of the 10 least competitive teams in modern NFL history:
The Giants would have to lose their final seven games by an average margin of 16 points per game. They could even throw a win or two in there if their blowouts are big enough to produce a -112 scoring differential but let’s just assume each game is a loss to simplify things. Final margin of victory in 2023? -260 and 15.29 points per game, just enough to slide ahead of the 3-11 1976 New York Jets for the 10th spot.
For the New York Giants to be the least competitive NFL team since 2001:
The Giants would have to lose their final seven games by an average margin of 16.7 points per game — a -117 scoring differential to close out the season. That would mean New York was outscored by 15.59 points per game, a hair in front of Detroit’s 2008 0-16 Fightin’ Orlovskys.
For the New York Giants to be the least competitive NFL team since 1981:
The Giants would have to lose their final seven games by an average margin of 19.1 points per game — tough, but not impossible considering DeVito is at 28 per game over his first two starts. That’s a -134 scoring differential. That would put New York’s per-game scoring difference at -16.59, ahead of the 1990 1-15 New England Patriots for fifth-worst all-time.
For the New York Giants to be the least competitive NFL team in the modern era:
The Giants would have to lose their final seven games by an average margin of 28.7 points per game. That’s a -201 scoring differential. That’s how bad the 0-14 Tampa Bay Buccaneers were in their debut season, losing by an average score of 29.4 to 8.9 each week.
For the New York Giants to be the least competitive, non-expansion NFL team in the modern era:
OK, let’s assume no one is ever gonna catch the debut of Hugh Culverhouse’s Bucs. Nor should they. Let history be.
But New York has an outside shot of claiming the record among teams that existed as NFL franchises the season prior. The Giants would have to lose their final seven games by an average margin of 23 points per game. That’s a -161 scoring differential. It would be enough to slide them past the 3-11 1972 New England Patriots for that dubious distinction.
Will they do it?
The soft landing spot over the back end of the schedule suggests no, but this is a Giants team with nothing to play for but pride and a potential franchise quarterback waiting at the end of a 2-15 finish. Still, it’s tough to imagine the New England Patriots or Los Angeles Rams beating this team by 20-plus points, even if the Philadelphia Eagles may take a whole season’s worth of frustrations out on them twice in the final three weeks of 2023.
That puts the realistic limit at a bottom 10 finish, which would still be historic in its own right. New York’s mission now is to lose the games that will deliver a high draft spot, but not lose by so much the Giants go down in history as a result.
That’s a narrow tightrope to walk, and Tommy DeVito will be the one walking it. He could be the difference between historically putrid and merely awful this fall.
