Numbers don’t lie: The most successful NFL teams of all time

Which NFL franchises are the most successful? What about the worst? There are fans from many franchises who believe they wear the crown and other, long-suffering fans who think no one could possibly have it worse than them. Is there a way to have that discussion with a little math behind it? A little nuance?

But I figured I’d give it a try anyway. I’m going to start with the results of my attempt in a graph and accompanying chart. This is the result of a few decisions to try and balance historical success with modern day myopia. If you’re interested in what it all means and how I got there, keep reading.

However, before you get too far into the methodology, ask yourself if the results vibe with what your gut is telling you. In fact, it might be fun to write down teams you think will be in the top 10 and teams you think will be in the bottom 10 and see how you do before studying the admittedly busy graph and chart below. (Don’t worry, I break it down into conferences and divisions later.)

The average (mean) in this chart is 56.24 Championship Points. When I look at that list and think about it from the modern perspective, it makes sense in my mind. In fact, I’d say that many football fans would nod their heads looking at the teams in the top 10 and do the same for the bottom 10 before getting lost in the messy middle. So, what do these numbers mean, what are “Championship Points” and what is “decay”?

Let’s start with the idea of championship points. It’s easy to just take a look at a list of Super Bowl championships and call it a day. I find that fails to tell the full story of a franchise, particularly since the league formed in 1920 and the NFL went through two mergers and multiple expansions to arrive at the 32 teams currently in operation.

I wanted to start by celebrating the idea of all championships – from 1920 leather helmets to the Eagles in 2024 – with some level of equality. I also wanted to account for what franchises think is important by giving points for division and conference titles. If it has a hat and t-shirt associated with it, it’s worth something. (Outside of the Colts, I don’t think anyone celebrates a championship game appearance. Also, no points for a Wild Card berth.)

The most elegant way I found was to award the number of points for that championship equal to the number of teams that competed for that title. Let’s take last year for example. All division winners were awarded 4 points for their divisional title, the Kansas City Chiefs earned 16 points for their AFC Championship, and the Philadelphia Eagles lifted 32 points for the Super Bowl. There’s no double counting, so Kansas City doesn’t get 16+4 for their two championships and Philadelphia doesn’t get 32+16+4 for their titles.

The size of divisions, conferences, and the NFL as a whole has shifted over the years, so each year throughout history those titles earned points corresponding to the number of teams. If we just look at the Chicago Bears, their 1921 championship was worth 21 points as the league had 21 teams at that time. Their other championships earned 8, 10, 10, 10, 8, and 10 through the 1946 championship, jumping to 14 in 1963, and finally 28 points for the Super Bowl XX victory.

What does it look like if we tally up all the championship points for each franchise?

Maybe it’s a surprise that the Patriots, having a relatively shorter lifespan than some other teams on this list, are in the top spot – but then again, the Bill Belichick – Tom Brady dynasty did a lot of damage here. This isn’t a particularly satisfying chart though, is it? The Texans have been around for a couple of decades while some of the old guard have over a century of play under their belt. Let’s divide these points by the number of years in existence and see if that’s more satisfying.

This is starting to feel more correct. Over the course of the lifetime of a franchise, here are the number of championship points per year they have earned. The average mark is 2.09, a number that will slowly creep up over time. There are normally 72 championship points given out each year under current configuration for 32 teams or 2.25 points per team – 32 for the Super Bowl Winner, 16 for Super Bowl Loser, and 4 each to the 6 divisional winners not in the Super Bowl. (If one or both of the Super Bowl participants came from a Wild Card berth, there would be an additional four or eight championship points given out that year. Again, no double counting of championships.)

A fair criticism of this chart is that it now punishes those franchises that have been around much longer. There were fewer points available for much of the early history – who is to say the Bears dominance in the 1940s wouldn’t have been similar in points accumulation to the Brady-Patriots run? Or the current Chiefs dynasty?
So, if total points and points per year don’t get us there, what does? Seems like a bit of a Goldilocks situation. Let’s blend the idea of history being worth something with the human element of recency bias.

What in the world is that chart doing at the beginning of the article? I’m introducing the idea of decay using a “half-life” on the Championship Points a franchise has earned. Yes, flags fly forever, but if your success was forever ago, you can only rest on that success for so long before fans start to get antsy. This is my attempt at capturing that feeling of a fanbase of “what have you done for me lately?”

I chose a decay rate equal to a generation, or twenty years. That means that a championship won 20 years ago is now worth half of what it was originally and a title earned 40 years ago is worth a quarter of what it once was and so forth. It doesn’t ever go away but it fades over time.

This provides us with a look over time at what the football world would have considered the most successful franchises to be at that moment. If I throw you in a time machine and send you back to a random year, the chart should give you a sense of who was considered the team at the time. In fact, let’s show a chart of only the “Frontier Franchises.”

The lead changes are as follows:

A few decision points I made along the way that everyone will agree with because that’s how these things work: First, I awarded points per championship including divisions and conferences but not playoff appearances. Wild Card berths are cool, but you don’t print t-shirts.

Next, I started decaying the value of the championship points that very next year. For one, it’s just easier that way. It would be imperceptible decay at first anyway and by the time you notice anything, a few years have elapsed. Combining that with a one-generation half-life simply made sense to me. I asked some fellow writers, and a couple said that it was too fast, and another couple said it was not fast enough. That’s a good Goldilocks answer for me.

Including the AAFC and AFL years into this analysis was not as obvious. I think that the mergers legitimized the franchises and those championship points that came pre- merger. It benefits the Cleveland Browns to a tremendous degree as they owned the AAFC from wire to wire. They also made good as a highly competitive and successful franchise post-merger.

I also did not decay their points for the three years that they did not exist in the league in the late 1990’s. I held them in mothballs. The AFL ran for a little longer pre-merger and the first four years of the Super Bowl were, in fact, pre-merger. This made it easier to include everything from that league.

Note that the chart shows only active franchises with the early years populated with many now-defunct franchises. Also note that in the event a franchise held the top spot multiple times, I only tagged their latest iteration in the chart.

That chart in the beginning is incredibly busy so I broke out the two conferences and tried to add logos where appropriate. I think this makes it significantly easier to see before we divide it even further into modern divisions.

Most of the early NFL teams stayed in the NFC when the league merged with the AFL with the exception of the Steelers, Browns, and Colts. That gives a little more historical length to the NFC picture. At one point I was talking through the results of this exercise with a friend and discovered my spreadsheet had a mistake for the New York Jets. I went back and fixed the mistake where they went from last to, well, still last. Woof.

I knew the Jets were bad – they easily made my mental bottom 5 before I completed the analysis – but they are in a 22-year divisional drought. I think they’re an interesting test case here though because they have a Super Bowl championship (SB III) in 1968. Does that make them a more successful franchise overall than, say, the Minnesota Vikings with no Super Bowls but four NFC championships and a respectable diet of competitive teams over the years?

The Ravens are probably a little lower than I’d expect, but they’re also a young franchise as they started over after their move away from Cleveland, leaving the records behind to be picked up by the expansion Browns in 1999. The Buccaneers are a bit higher than I might have initially thought, but that’s because I grew up with the Buccaneers as the laughingstock of the league. They won their second Super Bowl a few years ago and
have dominated the NFC South in the 2020’s.

As for the flip side of it, I’m not surprised by any of those teams down at the bottom. The Lions are starting to dig out with this current run, but they’ve had a long stretch of misery. The Cardinals, Jets, Jags, and Browns joining them in the bottom five instantly feels correct. The messy middle is just that. A solid stretch could move any of those middling teams up into the top 10 while a cold snap could erode their value to the bottom 10.

Divisional breakouts, ranked

I’ve ranked each of the eight modern divisions by their cumulative Championship Points. Note that these divisions are modern and, in some instances, the modern divisions hold teams that were not grouped together in previous iterations.

AFC West – 307.76 Championship Points.

Yes, the division with the current dynasty has the most cumulative championship points. The Andy Reid – Patrick Mahomes era has the Chiefs threatening to take over the top spot overall in the near future with their incredible run of dominance. They have surpassed the peak of the Denver Broncos, who have enjoyed a great deal of success, and the Las Vegas Raiders, who once held a frontier position in the league, peaking in 1993.

If we go back to the AFL days, where the Chargers had some early success, all four teams have been the most successful relative to the other three at one time.

NFC East – 299.02 Championship Points

A close second overall and the class of the NFC, the NFC East teams have all had a share of the divisional lead at some point in their history. With the recent success from the Eagles – two Super Bowls in the last decade – they moved ahead to take the lead over the Cowboys and Giants. They are currently the envy of many, where rival GMs are best suited to hit ignore when they see Howie Roseman’s name pop up on their cell.

The Cowboys have held the frontier position in the NFL twice – once with Tom Landry’s run in the 1970s and then again with the Jimmy Johnson / Triplets Era in the 1990s. The Giants were early leaders in the old NFL, had great success under Bill Parcells, and came back yet again with the Eli Manning upset wins over the Patriots. Although the Commanders haven’t led the division much, they had an amazing run under Joe Gibbs, briefly taking over the lead from the waning Landry years of the Cowboys. The NFC East has made 23 trips to the Super Bowl with 14 wins.

AFC East – 265.94 Championship Points

What can be said about the New England Patriots that hasn’t been said a thousand times somewhere else? The double dynasty that was early Belichick – Brady (3 SBs), bridged by a successful but ultimately Super Bowl championship drought of 9 years, to the late Brady – Belichick (3 SBs) did an enormous amount of damage. The Patriots successful run is the greatest we’ve ever seen in the game of football. During that time, the other teams in the division really suffered, essentially just wasting away in the shadows.

The Bills are starting to build back. The Dolphins once owned this division in the 1970s and 80s. And then there’s the Jets. The poor, poor Jets. After their Super Bowl III victory, the famous Joe Namath guarantee game, the Jets have won their division three times: once in 1969 (AFL conference) followed by a hot streak in 1998 and 2001.

NFC West – 245.50 Championship Points

The San Francisco 49ers have been doing the heavy lifting in this division since Bill Walsh, and while they haven’t been able to add another Super Bowl trophy since Steve Young, they have remained ultra-competitive to stay on top. The Rams have had multiple runs in their history and have enjoyed a big McVay bump. The Legion of Boom years in Seattle helped pull them get close to the 49ers, but Seattle has never led the division overall. The Cardinals, well … the Cardinals have never consistently been a contender and their brief moment in the sun was in the 1920s before most of the league was a member.

AFC North – 216.82 Championship Points

It should be no surprise that the Steelers are the class of this division. What you may be surprised to learn is that they were terrible for about the first four decades of their existence until Chuck Noll and a coin flip at the draft to win the rights to Terry Bradshaw changed their fortunes forever. The Browns entered the league hot with Paul Brown but it’s been a pretty steep decline since.

That franchise moved in the 1990s to Baltimore to give birth to the Ravens who have been very successful in their new location. That dip in the Browns line is to remind everyone that they were in mothballs for three years before starting anew. Now, if you combined the Ravens success with the Browns historical success, they would have briefly taken over the Steelers briefly in the early 2000s, but alas. The Bengals have been overall a steady lower-tier team with some successful runs to AFC titles keeping them out of the bottom five.

NFC North – 179.30 Championship Points

It’s hard to not be at least a little disappointed with this division overall relative to the rest of the league given the historical nature of three of these squads. The Green Bay Packers hold up their end of the bargain, holding early frontier positions, resetting again with Lombardi, and showing modern divisional dominance. The Bears and Vikings have battled back and forth over the decades for second place with the Bears holding the slightest lead currently. The Lions have settled into the cellar of this division for decades but have shown signs of life under Motor City Dan Campbell.

NFC South – 162.01 Championship Points

The NFC South is full of teams that started off their expansion existence in a rough way. The Buccaneers, Falcons, and especially the Saints all took a decade or longer before getting on the board with a division title in their previous divisional homes. The Panthers started successfully right away and have made this division overall one of the more tightly contested groups every year. The Bucs took a dominant lead in over the last few years following their second title run and grabbing the last five division titles.

AFC South – 120.48 Championship Points

The lowest ranking division has a couple of the youngest teams in the Texans and Jaguars, with the Texans moving up the ranks and poised to take over the number two spot from the Titans with another division title. The Titans can trace back to early AFL success as the Houston Oilers and with the Jeff Fisher run. The Colts had multiple waves of success, first as the Baltimore Colts and then with the Peyton Manning and Andrew Luck years. The Jags are only saved from the cellar by the Jets.

I started this exercise with the thought that some Bears fans needed to cool it with the “We’re the worst franchise ever” talk, but that the opposite sure wasn’t true either. Despite the great success in the early years, it’s pretty hazy the further away it drifts.

Running the numbers for the entire league reinforced where I’d fit most teams with few surprises for me personally. What’s also clear is that sustained success is difficult and slides can extend for years and sometimes decades. Maybe the best takeaway is to enjoy success while your team is experiencing it – because you never know how long and miserable the slide might be.

Let me know in the comments what surprised you the most or if this fits your perception of successful and unsuccessful franchises.