While kind of just skimming through videos on Youtube recently, I cam across this video of 10 teams that the creator of this video assumes will not win the Super Bowl in your lifetime.
Now, while I agree with many of his main points about the absurdity and staggering levels of ineptitude on the part of many of these franchises, it must be said also that I am highly skeptical of people saying that certain things can or will never happen. When I became a football fan back in the early eighties, there were some other teams that people back then probably assumed would always be inept, and would never win the big one, either. That would likely include the New York Giants who, when I began to be a fan back in 1981 (my introductory season as a fan of NFL football), had not been to the playoffs in 18 seasons. They made it that year (albeit barely), but then failed to make it the next two seasons, confirming many people's suspicions that they were some kind of inept team. Yet, they got better a few years later under head coach Bill Parcells, and wound up winning two Super Bowl titles, in 1986 and again in 1990, even though by the mid-seventies, the G-Men probably looked every bit as incompetent as the teams on this list did.
Furthermore, there were plenty of teams that, similarly, seemed simply inept back then. That includes a few of the teams on this list, including the New York Jets, the Detroit Lions, and the Cleveland Browns. But by the early nineties, the guy doing this video would surely have put other franchises on this list, had he been making videos back then. Surely, he would have looked at the 1990-92 New England Patriots (who went 1-15, 6-10, and 2-14 in those three seasons) as perhaps the prime team that surely would never get things straight. Perhaps he would have put the Seattle Seahawks on that list, as well. In 1992, those were the two worst teams in the league, period, and I can remember that. Washington, by contrast, looked like they would always field a serious contender, and the Raiders and Dolphins both were perennial contenders, and each of those teams are now on the list of teams that, according to this guy, will not win a Super Bowl in our lifetime.
In other words, things change. I would bet that if this guy could have made a video in the 1989 season, he would have put the Dallas Cowboys on top of the list of teams that we would never see win the Super Bowl. But things can change fast in the NFL. The 'Boys finished a dismal 1-15 in 1989, which was the worst record that I had seen up to that point. In 1992, they finished 13-3 and won the first of three Super Bowls titles in a four years span. Just a few years ago, the Chiefs likely would have seen unlikely as a team that would rise up and win a Super Bowl, despite being a normal playoff contender, because it had been almost half a century since they last even qualified for the big game, and had made exactly one AFC Championship Game appearance in nearly half a century. Now, they have been to three straight AFC title games and the last two Super Bowls, and they won it all a couple of years back.
So now, I am not personally a fan of predictions projecting that this or that team will never win it all. Things might be going awry for a franchise for a long time, and then it turns around, often incredibly quickly. I already mentioned the Dallas Cowboys and the New England Patriots, but the Rams were a basket case throughout the nineties, until from one year to the next, they rose from a perennial doormat to Super Bowl champions, just like that.
Don't get me wrong: I am not predicting a Super Bowl title for any of these teams, specifically. However, both the Raiders and the Browns feel like they might be serious contenders to at least reach the Super Bowl even this season. Things can change, and those teams have gone from many years of being irrelevant and uncompetitive to being seemingly quite talented and dangerous now.
Plus, this guy's logic feels faulty. The Houston Texans might be going through a rut right now, but they were a regular playoff contender for years until recently, which hardly feels as inept as some teams that went many years without a single playoff berth, like the Browns and the Bills, who are yet another team that looked hopeless just a few years ago, but appear to be a serious contender for the past couple of seasons now.
The long and short of it is this: things change. Circumstances change, and situations change. The Browns not too long ago had not won a playoff game in over two decades, but they beat the Steelers in Pittsburgh in January, and then came fairly close to advancing to the AFC Championship. Right now, they are one of the hottest teams in the league, and many feel that they might even just be legitimate Super Bowl contenders this very season, something that you might never suspect if you only watched this particular video.
So let's have a little perspective, because things change, even greatly, in a relatively short time. Again, at the end of the 1993 season, the New England Patriots were still one of the worst teams in the NFL, and the Denver Broncos were considered a team that just could not win the big one. A decade later, amidst much else that had changed in the NFL, both of those teams had won multiple Super Bowls. So let's not get ahead of ourselves and suggest that it is impossible that one, or even many of these teams on this list will not ever win a Super Bowl in our lifetime, because that has been said before about many other teams, and often, it proves to be just a bunch of bull.
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