In 1946, the Pittsburgh Steelers went 5-5-1. While the sum of the team’s parts may have been perfectly average, their components were far from it. The head coach was newly-hired Jock Sutherland, who had been a local hero after taking the Pitt Panthers to four Rose Bowls. After a stint in the Navy during World War II, he returned to the city and coached the Steelers for two seasons, beginning in 1946. In the 10-team NFL, Pittsburgh allowed the fewest points in the NFL at 10.6 per game, a mark that would not be matched again until the Lombardi Packers in 1962. The NFL average in 1946 was 18.9 points per game, and every other team allowed at least 14.4 points per game. Unfortunately, the Steelers offense was as bad as the defense was good: the black and gold finished last in the league in scoring at 12.4 points per game.

That 1946 team was led by Bill Dudley, an all-world star who won the league’s MVP award. In addition to leading the league in rushing yards… and punt return yards and average… Dudley intercepted 10 passes that season! That remarkable fact came despite the Steelers only facing 162 pass attempts that season, meaning Dudley intercepted one out of every 16.2 passes the Steelers defense saw that season. It remains arguably the greatest season of thievery in NFL history.

Those ’46 Steelers were otherwise an unremarkable team, notable for this one fact: Pittsburgh is the last team to finish as the league’s lowest scoring team and to also allow the fewest points in the league. But this year, the 2022 Denver Broncos are challenging that mark. Through 9 games and 10 weeks of the season, Denver ranks last in scoring and first in points allowed. The Broncos have 131 points scored through 9 games — a very bad number although not a particularly low mark for the league’s worst-scoring team. ^[1]Last year, Houston scored 128 points through 9 games, and this year, the Colts have just one more point than Denver And they have allowed 149 points despite facing 11.8 drives per game (thanks, offense), tied for the most in the NFL.

A few teams have come close to pulling off this rare achievement, but it’s remarkable to consider that no team has done this since Sutherland’s Steelers. ^[2]Only one team has gone in the other direction: the 2000 Rams led the league in scoring but also ranked last in points allowed. There have been just 31.1 points per game scored in Broncos games this season.  In the last 25 seasons, only two other times has that happened: the famed 2000 Ravens teams, and the 2005 Bears team that tried to replicate that approach, using Brian Urlacher as Ray Lewis and Kyle Orton as Trent Dilfer.

We can also look at this another way.  In Steelers games in 1946, both teams combined to average just 23 points per game, while the average was 37.8 points per game.  So Pittsburgh games produced 14.8 fewer points per game than league average. ^[3]Which, of course, includes Pittsburgh games..  This year, the Broncos games are producing 31.1 points per game in a league environment where 43.8 points per game is average, putting 2022 Denver at -12.7.  That ranks as the 5th worst of all time (the ’46 Steelers are the worst), and the worst of any team since the merger. ^[4]Of course, we are only 9 games into the season, and we would assume that Denver games will regress — at least somewhat — to the mean by year end.

Finally, here’s one other way to look at Denver’s failure.  The Broncos are are scoring 14.6 points per game, which is 7.3 fewer PPG than average.  Meanwhile, Denver is allowing 16.6 points per game, 5.3 points per game less than average.    To be at 5 PPG lower than average on both fronts is very, very rare! It’s happened just four times before:

• The ’46 Steelers, of course.
• The 1950 Steelers had five players from that ’46 team, and are mostly remembered for being the last team to employ the single wing.  The 1950 season was a weird one in the NFL, as the Colts and Yanks from the AAFL had terrible defenses that skewed numbers a bit. But Pittsburgh finished with the worst scoring offense in the NFL and ranked with the 4th-best defense in points allowed, but at a mark that was still 6.7 points per game better than average.
• The 1956 Browns were the lone year in a halcyon era of Cleveland football where neither Otto Graham nor Jim Brown were on the roster.  The defense was its typically dominant unit under Paul Brown, but the team scored less than half as many points as it did in the team’s championship season the year before.
• The 1957 Steelers — yes, I am also amazed at both how many Steelers teams are on here and how none of them were coached by Bill Cowher — also make the list.  Coached by Buddy Parker, Pittsburgh went 6-6, of course, with the league’s worst ranked scoring attack but the number two scoring defense. Remarkably, the ’57 team had Earl Morrall, Jack Kemp, and Len Dawson in the quarterback room.

Let me close with a look at all teams where, the offense and defense combined to produce at least 8 points per game fewer than league average. Here’s how to read the table below. In 1946, Pittsburgh and Pittsburgh’s opponents combined for 23 points per game when the league average was 37.8 points per game, a difference of -14.8. Pittsburgh scored 12.4 PPG, while allowing 10.6 PPG. Compared to league average, the Steelers were 6.5 points per game below the mark, and allowed 8.3 fewer points per game than league average. The “min” column is useful if you want to sort by teams who achieved a certain minimum mark in both categories: it is basically the lower (well, technically higher because these are negative numbers) of the PPG vs. League Average and PPG Allowed vs. League average marks. Finally, the last two columns show where the team ranked in points scored (in ascending order, so you can see how close to being the worst a team was) and points allowed.

Enjoy!