Now, there is way, way too much luck, and way too many moving parts, over way too small of a sample size in football to be confident on any sort of rankings like that, so I certainly don't feel like their list was right or wrong. That said, I wanted to find a quick way to create an objective list, some method of rankings teams with more granularity than wins and losses, but not having to insert my own subjective judgements.
Fortunately, Pro-Football Reference gave me a great method. They have a nifty stat they call Simple Rating System, which is just as simple as it suggests; nothing to be afraid of. It's merely margin of victory, adjusted for opponents' margin of victory (for strength of schedule) and compared to league average. So, simply, you get how much a team beat their opponents by, with theoretical stability for different eras and different schedules.
Very cool, and a nice way of comparing teams quickly and easily in terms of strength. There are things it's missing, like the luck that goes in to actual points scored, or the postseason being 1-4 more valuable games for judging teams by, but whatever, this is good enough for a framework.
So, I pulled out a list of every team that ever had a SRS of 10+ (again, that is outscoring their opponents by 10 points a game, with schedule and league average adjustments) that did not manage to win the Super Bowl. The result is 57 teams. So I cut that down to every team that had an SRS of 12+, which is obviously out of reach by simply scoring a touchdown and a field goal, plus that gives an almost-perfect 21 teams. Then I wanted to post them somewhere, so I figured I'd dust off this blog and do just that.
So that's what's happening. I'm going to post them in groups of fives, with #21 in this here post as an introduction. I think there are some obvious teams in here, along with a few surprises. I hope someone other than me actually finds this interesting.
Obviously when talking about teams that didn't win the Super Bowl, I'm going to look only at teams since 1966.
Let's start with one I'll bet no one guesses.
21 - 2012 Seattle Seahawks (11-5, Wild Card, 412 PF, 245 PA, 12.2 SRS)
The Seahawks get here largely by having the best scoring defense in the league. though not by having the best defense at preventing yards or first downs. I think there's a little bit of reason to believe, while awesome, the defense was not "truly" awesome enough to have them as the actual 21.
I do think they were the best team in the NFC, though, at the time the playoffs came around. If not for playing an early away game on the east coast, I think they probably would have been expected to at least make the Championship Game.
Being a recent team, though, there is not much to talk about in way of their place in history, which is something a list like here is usually intended to focus on. This isn't a team that time will remember, other than maybe the start of something great if their talent blossoms the way a lot of experts expect. There aren't noteworthy players to talk about yet, there aren't huge moments other than what you see in the picture. Just a good team that scoring margin thinks was a great team, that failed to get very far. They did go on a 150-30 stretch over three games, though, including one over the eventual NFC champs. That's pretty cool.
As a side note, this was one of four teams this past year to have a +10 or better Simple Rating System scoring margin to not win the Super Bowl. At the bottom, the Broncos (+10.1) rank as the 52nd best non-Super Bowl winner ever, while the 49ers (+10.2) rank 47th, but at least managed to get there. Another team will be on this list later.
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