With the exception of the Patriots, parity rules the NFL. Many franchises duck in and out of the postseason with little consistency as players shift teams and a restrictive salary cap prevents the formation of the big-market superteams that rule the NBA and MLB.
As a result, amazing turnarounds have become the rule rather than the exception in the league. In 13 of the past 14 years, at least one team has gone from last place in its division to first.
Last year, we pegged the Cowboys as the most likely candidate to make the jump. Dak Prescott and Ezekiel Elliott came through with monster rookie campaigns to fulfill that prediction. Picking 2017’s turnaround team wasn’t as easy. Here are the eight teams who finished last in their respective divisions in 2016:
The majority of those teams are stuck in quarterback hell, bottoming out toward a rebuild, or a combination of the two. That leaves three likely candidates to carry on the league’s rich worst-to-first tradition. Here’s who we think could make the leap from the division basement into the postseason.
If the the last year in America taught us anything, it’s that some things can be repeated into existence. It’s easy to feel so inundated by the way things are that you start to believe they’ll never change. That was the NFL, making fistfuls of money while, more and more, getting players to capitulate to owners and selling a product that has, for a couple decades, been boring and basic and largely what you expected when you flipped on the TV.
Like the drone of white noise, the NFL came to be accepted as part of Cheap Pittsburgh Penguins Jerseys the background. Even if it was bad, it was the Thing You Do On Sundays. Knowing something is bad isn’t the same as acting on it. People do lots of terrible things out Cheap Queensland Jerseys of habit. That is until the record skips, the noise stops, and then silence feels like a new reality.
