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This Sunday’s “NFL” match-up between the 0-4 Miami dolphins and the 0-5 Washington Redskins has the historical backing of being the worst game in the history of the NFL and it’s not even remotely close.
The last time two winless NFL teams met in Week 6 was 15 years ago in 2004 between the Buffalo Bills and (shocker) Miami Dolphins. The Dolphins ended up winning that Tank Bowl by losing the game. This helped them secure the following year’s #2 overall draft pick so they could flush it down the aquarium drain on running back Ronnie Brown.
To say this year’s Tank Bowl is in a league of its own would be an understatement and quite frankly deeply offensive to AFL, XFL, and Lingerie League teams everywhere. Just because the win/loss records of both the 2004 and 2019 Tank Bowls were the same doesn’t make them equivalent. To determine the more pathetic match-up, we must look at point differentials (total points scored minus points given up from all games) as the tie-breaker. In Tank Bowl 2004, both the Bills and Dolphins entered Week 6 with a combined point differential of -67 points. It’s expectedly very bad, but Bush league compared to the gargled yak phlegm representing for 2019. This year’s Washington Redskins point differential alone is -78 through the first five weeks. This means they are losing by an average of over 15 points a game which is good for second worst in 2019. Take notice of the literary foreshadowing of that sentence.
For some perspective on how bad the Redskins have been this year, the 0 – 16 Browns of 2017 held a better point differential of only -47 after five weeks. This year’s Redskins have already cycled through all their quarterbacks and realized the first guy is probably the less shitty of the bunch. They also ditched their Smoking Jay version of a coach a week after announcing his plan of not having a plan for who will play quarterback. They will take the field on Sunday as the favorite.
Let’s be real though. The Redskins are merely the opening act of this year’s Tank Bowl and it’s time to introduce the headliner. Reach out your hands, because the Miami Dolphins have a beer for us all to hold. Enjoy the show.
I chronicled just how historically bad the Dolphins were in Week 1 and let me tell you, they have outdid themselves since then. With a point differential of –137 through the first five weeks, the Dolphins are losing by over 34 PPG on average. To properly articulate how abysmal this is, consider that in 2018 the Chiefs averaged a league high 35.3 PPG. This means that the 2019 Dolphins are losing each game by basically as many points as the 2018 Chiefs scored every game. Imagine playing against Pat Mahomes in 2018, only your team wasn’t allowed to score any points. This is the state of the 2019 Miami Dolphins every time they take the field.
I meticulously scoured through the records to see how many teams had a worse point differential in the history of the NFL than the 2019 Dolphins after five weeks. I went through each and every year all the way back to the NFL’s inception in 1920. The results are provided below in its entirety:
This is the part where I remind everyone that not only has Miami accumulated the worst point differential through five weeks in NFL history, but they did so despite having the benefit of a bye week to limit the continual onslaught numerous other teams had to endure.
Don’t give the Dolphins their beer back yet. They have quite the encore planned.
As you know, in 2017 the Cleveland Browns won exactly zero games. It took that very team 13 games to achieve a point differential lower than what this year’s Dolphins have done in only four. The next worse point differential in NFL history after the first five weeks belongs to the 1963 St. Louis Rams (-128) followed closely by the 1923 Oorang Indians (-125).
Don’t feel too bad if you don’t recall an NFL team from Oorang or if you don’t even know where Oorang is on a map because not even Google knows:
How can there have been an NFL team with a home city that doesn’t even exist? Well, it took some digging but thanks to one of my holies on Twitter, I learned that the Oorang Indians were an NFL team for a two-year stint from 1922-23 that played all but one of their games on the road. The fact that they played one home game is actually pretty impressive seeing as how there is literally no place anywhere named Oorang. As it turns out, “Oorang” wasn’t referring to a city at all, but instead for a breed of dog, because the team was literally purchased for $100 as a means to advertise the owner’s dog kennels. The Oorang Indians were based in LaRue, Ohio which is a place in Ohio that even people from Ohio have never heard of. And the single home game they played wasn’t even in LaRue, because LaRue didn’t have a football field. Instead, the team had to travel to a completely different town to play their one “home” game elsewhere.
Olympian Jim Thorpe was hired to be Oorang’s player/coach and was required by his dog kennel owner that all players on the team be Native American and work at his dog kennel. One of the players by the name of Long Time Sleep even put on the half-time entertainment show in one of the games by literally wrestling a bear. With only three wins in two years, the Oorang Indians folded presumably after tiring out from traveling to a new city every week, including their one home game.
This is the part where I reiterate that this is a legitimate real actual true factually corroborated story and link all the evidence. I couldn’t make this up in a million years. It’s a picture-perfect NFL version of “Slap Shot” and the fact that it was never a Paul Newman movie titled “No Shot” is appalling.
Anyway, I mention all of this to provide some context when I say that the 2019 Miami Dolphins are off to a worse start through five week than the 1923 Oorang Indians. Don’t bother handing their beer back. Those Dolphins are dead.
I don’t know who’s going to win this year’s Tank Bowl, but with a combined point differential of –215 for both teams, this game is about to set the NFL back before the days of the Oorang Indians. I don’t have a clue how Vegas decided to set the line because a match-up with this caliber of ineptitude is simply unprecedented. They’d be better off offering a prop bet. Here’s my suggestion:
If the NFL is to do something to save face from this looming embarrassment of a game they would be wise to use history as their guide and treat both teams the way the poor Oorang Indians were treated. For starters, forcing players on either team to wrestle a live bear at halftime needs to be on the table. If that doesn’t serve as an adequate distraction, it’ll be time to think about forcing both these contemptible rube ridden teams to play the rest of their games on the road and take away their home city altogether so that at least the good people of Miami and D.C. can have back their dignity.
Before long, both teams should soon dissipate quietly into oblivion. This way everyone putting on a jersey or headset for either of these hapless franchises can focus on contractual commitments more suitable to their skill-sets such as wallowing in the dog shit that they are in the piss-ridden kennels they can at least call home.
-El Jefe
