The first Monday night of the regular season gives us two football games to enjoy. At 7:00, the Bengals travel to Baltimore giving Cincinnati an immediate chance to prove that last year’s playoff berth was no fluke. At 10:15, the Chargers travel to Oakland and look to show that missing out on the last two postseasons was nothing more than a fluke.
Let’s start with the Bengals. In 2011, Cincinnati lost every game they played against playoff teams and won every game against non-playoff teams. The nine wins came against Cleveland (twice), Buffalo, Jacksonville, Indianapolis, Seattle, Tennessee, St. Louis and Arizona. On the other hand, the Bengals lost twice each to Pittsburgh, Baltimore, and Houston, and lost in Denver and San Francisco early in the year.
That is more an interesting bit of trivia than anything else. No team since the merger had ever done that before, and only two pre-merger teams managed to pull of that feat. [1]In the early ’50s, the playoffs consisted of just a championship game between the two division winners. In 1953, the 49ers lost both games division rival Detroit and to Eastern division champ … Continue reading For the Bengals, the odd split is more an embarrassing blemish that rival fans can point to than anything else. It’s not as if the Bengals can’t beat playoff teams, it’s simply that they didn’t. In 1969, the Cowboys went 0-3 against playoff teams and 11-0-1 against non-playoff teams; the next season, Dallas made the Super Bowl and in 1971 the Cowboys won it. Lombardi’s Packers pulled off the same feat in the middle of their great run: in ’63, Green Bay was 0-2 against playoff teams and 11-0-1 against non-playoff teams a year after having one of the most dominant seasons in football history. The Bengals weren’t a great team last year, but had they gone 7-2 against non-playoff teams and 2-5 in the regular season against playoff teams, would they — or rather, should they — be viewed as any better? Swapping a win against Pittsburgh and Baltimore for losses against say, Cleveland and Seattle?
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References
| ↑1 | In the early ’50s, the playoffs consisted of just a championship game between the two division winners. In 1953, the 49ers lost both games division rival Detroit and to Eastern division champ Cleveland; the 49ers went 9-0 against the rest of the league. The year before, the Rams pulled off the same feat: they lost week 1 in Cleveland, week 2 against Detroit, and week 4 in Detroit, while winning every other game. That gave them a 9-3 record, the same as the Lions, which at the time mandated a play-in game. Detroit beat Los Angeles in that one, too. If you limit the study to just regular season results, you end up with two more teams. In 1999, the Jacksonville Jaguars went 14-0 against non-playoff teams but lost both games to division rival Tennessee; the Titans would also defeat the Jaguars in the AFC Championship Game, proving that Tom Coughlin was incapable of winning the big one. And in 1950, the Cleveland Browns were swept by division rival New York but won every other game that season; they didn’t face Western Division champ Los Angeles in the regular season. Cleveland ended the season 10-2, just like the Giants. The Browns avoided losing a third straight game to New York, winning 8-3 in the play-in game, and then captured the NFL championship by defeating Los Angeles the next week. |
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