Wild, Wacky NFC South Division

Projecting who will win the Super Bowl is a bit like playing poker. You have to evaluate the teams at the top of the league like you would other players at a poker table. What kind of teams are they, are they trending up, are they trending down, and what do they have to work with in terms of chips or assets? Like poker, projecting teams has an element of luck to it just as much at the element of skill. In Hold’em poker randomness can destroy your session, just as in forecasting random oddities can curtail successful prognostication.

For example, if you want to talk about a weird run of cards, you need only look at the history of the NFC South division to know each year in the NFL is completely different than the previous year. The NFC South has been around since realignment in 2002 and it’s been basically unpredictable ever since.

They say hope springs eternal and nowhere is that truer than the division that has a history of worst to first. Want a sign of a team’s likely success the next year? Look for the team that finished last the previous year in the NFC South. In six of the seven years of the division being in existence the last place team in the division, the previous year, won the division the next. Even better, the previous last place team has qualified for the NFL playoffs in the following year in all seven years.

Also, no team in the division of perpetual upheaval has gone to the playoffs in back to back years. This makes the NFC South one of the most competitive divisions in football but also one of the hardest to pick (unless you are just blindly taking last year’s last place to qualify for the playoffs). Every year it would make sense that the previous winner would be in the best place to repeat.

The division has had three wildcard teams in its history which is just under the four it should have if all things were equal. At the same time, the division is responsible for two Super Bowl winners Tampa Bay (2003) and New Orleans (2010). The Carolina Panthers finished runners-up in 2004. The fourth member of the division, Atlanta, lost in the NFC Championship in 2004 and had a Super Bowl appearance shortly before realignment.

Tampa Bay has won the division three times, New Orleans and Carolina twice, with Atlanta winning only once. However, the Falcons have two of the three wild card berths and are tied with Tampa Bay and Carolina with three playoff appearances. New Orleans, like Tampa Bay, has only qualified for the playoffs when it has won the division.

What does that mean looking forward? Perhaps this is one division you should throw out things like most talent coming back, coaching staff, and intangibles. For if you were to do that, you’d likely have New Orleans repeating as champion, last year’s second place and improving Atlanta contending for first but earning a wild card bid, with Carolina mired still rebuilding and last place Tampa Bay overwhelmed by divisional opponents.

However, if history is your guide you’d say, no team has made the playoffs in back to back years… so throw out New Orleans from the top two spots, as there is likely enough talent in the division to get two teams in the playoffs. You’d take formerly last place Tampa Bay to transform themselves from a 3 -13 team to a 11-5 or 10-6 division champion. There is nothing in the division’s crazy history to suggest Atlanta can’t qualify as the wild-card despite finishing second last year. However, it is interesting to note in 04-05 Carolina and Tampa Bay finished third and fourth in the division. The next year they finished with the same record of 11-5 and qualified for the playoffs, so maybe this go around the third place team (Carolina) will be the wildcard as it was that year.