The Bengals introduce the Dynasties of Heartbreak

We’d like to thank the Cincinnati Bengals for losing the Super Bowl in crushing fashion and helping us introduce the Dynasties of Heartbreak. When Aaron Donald took over the last couple of plays in the Super Bowl, finishing the Rams comeback and handing the Bengals their third-ever loss in the championship game, it was heartbreaking for Cincinnati fans. They had a lead with 90 seconds left in the season, and yet came away from 2021 without the title that has eluded them for their entire franchise history. It’s alright, though — with young superstars such as Joe Burrow and Ja’Marr Chase, 2021 is going to be a temporary setback. The core of this current Bengals team will one day get the opportunity to hoist a Lombardi Trophy high in the air and give the good people of Cincinnati the ticker-tape parade they have been waiting for since the heyday of the Big Red Machine in the 1970s, and…

… what are those sounds coming from Minnesota and Buffalo? It sounds like some strange combination of laughing and sobbing simultaneously. Huh. That’s weird.

The history of the NFL is littered with teams which have etched their names in legend. Teams that have dominated the league for years at a time, vanquishing all that came before them and defining the shape of the league. But we’re not here to talk about those guys. Instead, we’re here to talk about the runners-up. To celebrate the agony of defeat. To salute those who tried so hard and got so far, but in the end, it didn’t even matter. As part of our ongoing quest to highlight every single significant run in NFL history, we are proud to present our Dynasties of Heartbreak — the teams that could have, and in some cases should have, come away with far more glory than they actually managed.

The teams we’re highlighting this year include some of the most interesting cases in NFL history. When we did the dynasty rankings or the anti-dynasty rankings, we were talking about actual results. We know what the league looks like in a world where the Patriots trampled their 21st century competition, or the Packers ran over everyone in the 1960s. We know what the state of football is in Cleveland and Arizona after decades of failure. We live in the world created by these outcomes. Ranking those teams just involves documenting what everyone has already seen.

But somewhere out there in the Multiverse of Madness, there are other possible outcomes. What if The Catch had not been Caught, The Drive not been Driven, the Immaculate Reception not Immaculately Recepted? What if the Seahawks had just given the damn ball to Marshawn Lynch, if Scott Norwood had hooked his kick six inches to the left, if Bart Starr had slipped on the ice? Somewhere out there, there must be a world where Marty Schottenheimer’s Browns won a title, or Marty Schottenheimer’s Chiefs won a title, or Marty Schottenheimer’s Chargers won a title. These Heartbreak Dynasties allow us to imagine what if outcomes had been slightly different — would the Oilers have left Houston? Would the Rams have left Los Angeles? Would Philip Rivers be a first-ballot Hall of Famer? Would we be lifting the Owen Trophy instead of the Lombardi?

These second-place and runner-up teams can sometimes get forgotten, at least outside their own fan bases. Or worse yet, they’re remembered only for failure, ignoring the fact that you have to be quite good to get into position to lose multiple Super Bowls and conference championships in a short period of time. There can only be one champion a year, and just because you run into a 1980s 49ers or 1970s Steelers doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be remembered and celebrated. At least, that’s our excuse for digging up and relitigating some of the most painful moments in various franchise’s history.

And yes, we acknowledge that this is very subjective — even more subjective than declaring a team the most or least successful in the history of the NFL. A team’s most crushing season is the one that happened when you were 10 years old and could devote a larger part of your hopes and dreams into men wearing the same shirt as one another. We’re trying to figure out which teams would hurt the prototypical 10-year-old the most, but what we’re really doing is using the excuse of a list and ranking to talk about a bunch of fun teams from the past in a vaguely organized fashion. In short, we expect and welcome arguments about who should be higher or lower, because quantifying pain is so much more subjective than quantifying success. And arguments are half the fun during the June doldrums anyway.

Methodology

For a single season, a team’s heartbreak score is broken down into three parts — their win-loss record, their DVOA and their playoff run.

Win-loss record is easy: the more games you win in the regular season, the more painful it is to not come away with a championship. Teams earn points based on how far above .500 they were in any given season, with a perfect season getting 100 points and an 8-8 year getting 0. Specifically, it’s (win-loss percentage – 0.5 * 200). Last year’s Bengals went 10-7 for a win percentage of .588, giving them 17.6 heartbreak points. The 13-4 Packers got 52.9, the 9-8 Eagles got 5.9, and so on and so forth.

DVOA is easy — the better your team was, the more painful it is to not come away with a championship. That, too, is simple. We take a team’s positive DVOA, capped at 50%, and multiply it by 200. Last season’s Bengals actually had a slightly negative DVOA, but we don’t penalize them for that. There are no negative heartbreak points as that would imply that a team would be pleased for some reason that they didn’t win a Super Bowl. But the league-leading Cowboys’ DVOA of 30.9% earned them 61.8 heartbreak points; a dominant regular season leads to more pain when you eventually collapse. For 1950 to 1980, we use Andreas Shepard’s Estimated DVOA, and for 1920 to 1949, we use SRS-to-DVOA conversions.

Playoff run points are more complicated. They are based on two assumptions. First, losing deeper into a playoff run should hurt more. All things being equal, it hurts to lose a Super Bowl more than it hurts to lose a wild-card game. Secondly, it hurts more to lose a close game than a blowout. Bills fans are pained more by Scott Norwood hooking his field goal wide right than they are from the Cowboys blowing them off the field two years later.

Teams thus get points for how deep they went in the postseason, modified by how close the game actually was. A Super Bowl loss is worth between 100 and 200 points, a conference championship loss is worth between 50 and 100, a divisional round loss is worth between 30 and 50, and a wild-card loss is worth between 0 and 20. You get the full value if you lose by one point or in overtime. You get the minimum if you lose by more than 20 points. A more accurate system would take into account if the losing team had the ball with a chance to score at the end of the game, or if they padded the point differential with garbage-time points and so on and so forth, perhaps taking into account average win probability over the course of a matchup, but the play-by-play data needed to do that simply isn’t available for the majority of NFL history. To keep everything on a fair playing field, we’re just linearly sliding down by margin of defeat. The Bengals earn 180 heartbreak points for their 23-20 loss in the Super Bowl, which gives them 197.6 heartbreak points for 2021 when combined with their other points. By comparison, the Cowboys’ wild-card exit only earned them 14.0 heartbreak points. So even though they were the better team than the Bengals for the regular season, their 2021 only picked up 117.0 heartbreak points. Playoff failures are what stick in the memory and are the most important part of any heartbreak rankings.

The perfect season would earn 400 points — an undefeated regular season, a DVOA over 50.0% and the closest possible loss in the Super Bowl. That has never happened, but the 2007 Patriots managed to score a 390 when the Giants knocked them off in Super Bowl XLII. That comes out as the most painful individual season in this system, joining the 1942 Bears, 1968 Colts, 2001 Rams, 1948 Cardinals, and 1990 Bills as the only seasons worth 300 points or more.

But we’re not interested in single-season heartbreak. It sucked for Patriots fans that they lost in 2007, but they won Super Bowls on both sides of that loss. The Bears won plenty in the 1940s, the Colts rebounded from Super Bowl III to win Super Bowl V, and so on and so forth. While those seasons sucked in the moment, we have to take into account all the success that happened around them in order to truly judge how painful an era was. Even the most painful Super Bowl defeat is somewhat soothed by a full trophy collection.

Each championship a team wins radiates out heartbreak-soothing rays, diminishing the pain of any lost years around them. One year removed from a Super Bowl win in either direction knocks off up to 400 heartbreak points. Two years away removes 200 points, three years 100 and four years 50. Those stack, too — the 2002 Patriots season, bookended by three Super Bowls, has a 1,000-point penalty, because no one feels bad that New England didn’t win four out of four Super Bowls. With these penalties included, the 1990 Bills season becomes the most painful in NFL history; all the other notably painful years had championships around them which counteract some of the heartbreak.

Yes, this means that a season can become less painful retroactively, but I think that makes sense. If the Bengals win the Super Bowl in 2022, 2021 will be looked back at as a building year and a learning year, and an important step on the way to their eventual glory. If they don’t, it’s a horrendous missed opportunity, but only time can provide the proper context!

To calculate a team’s score over multiple years — which is how we’re ranking them here — we use a weighted system. A team’s run starts the first year they would earn points before the championship penalty. It ends when they either have back-to-back non-scoring seasons (either a losing record, or a .500 record with a negative DVOA) or they win a championship. Their total score is computed by summing 100% of their heartbreak score for their best season, 95% for their next-best season, and so forth. This prevents a team from just compiling wild-card losses and pretending that’s as bad as a Super Bowl loss, a way of balancing both breadth and depth of heartbreak.

That leaves us with 44 Heartbreak Dynasties, 44 runs of teams that earn at least 400 points. We’re going to spend the next couple weeks counting them down and celebrating, and at the end, we’ll declare which team in which era caused the most pain. We’re keeping the final list secret until the end because we’re not making distinctions between quantity and quality at this time around. I have a sneaking suspicion certain fan bases may be able to predict the names at the top.

Circle the wagons, fly Eagles fly and chant Skol; we have some painful memories to unearth.

No. 44: 1986-1990 Cincinnati Bengals

Total Heartbreak Points: 404.2
 Playoff Points: 216.4
 Win-Loss Points: 85.0
 DVOA Points: 102.8
 Record: 43-36 (.544)
 Playoff Record: 3-2 (one Super Bowl loss, one divisional loss)
 Average DVOA: 7.9%
 Head Coach: Sam Wyche
 Key Players: QB Boomer Esiason, RB James Brooks, WR Eddie Brown, TE Rodney Holman, OT Anthony Munoz, G Max Montoya, DT Tim Krumrie, S David Fulcher

The current Bengals squad is young and exciting, and seems on pace to be a perennial contender, despite a disappointing loss in a close Super Bowl to a California team. Yeah, about that…

While the Bengals made two Super Bowls in the 1980s, those Cincinnati squads were more of a flash-in-the-pan team — they lost some of their young talent to the upstart USFL, they traded away their planned successor to Ken Anderson, they had multiple players suspended for illegal drug activity, and their head coach left after 1983 to go coach the Packers, viewing that job as an upgrade. That opened the door for Sam Wyche, who built a team that would have a more extended run of success.

Wyche brought a few offensive innovations with him to Cincinnati, some more effective than others. Wyche was obsessed with giving his offense a personnel advantage, getting spread sets against heavy defenses and vice versa. This went through several false starts. First, he tried having his offense huddle on the sideline, with 20 or so players around him to confuse the defense. The actual players involved in the play would sprint to the ball and snap quickly once it was ready to prevent the defense from substituting. The NFL put the kibosh on that quickly, so Wyche went to what he called the “sugar huddle,” where 12 or 13 players would huddle on the field quickly, with the extra players running off the field when the huddle broke. This was also quickly nixed by the league, which was getting annoyed at Wyche messing with the huddle. Well, then, what if the Bengals simply never huddled at all?

In 1986, Wyche and coordinator Bruce Coslett installed the no-huddle offense as a base package, making Cincinnati the first team to use it as their regular offense. By the time they had worked out all the kinks in 1988, the Bengals were nearly unstoppable on offense, leading the league with a 31.3% DVOA. Wyche’s teams were in the top 10 offensively for six straight years, but the no huddle took it to a new level, with Boomer Esiason dealing to Eddie Brown and Tim McGee, and James Brooks and Ickey Woods splitting time in the backfield. The NFL, again, wasn’t pleased, threatening to penalize the Bengals every time they went no-huddle in the AFC Championship Game, but Wyche fought back against that and won. Marv Levy and the Bills, who lost that game, were so frustrated by the Bengals attack that they ended up copying the tactic for their own teams in the 1990s, which we will get to in due time. The league eventually had to introduce new rules regarding substitutions to keep up with Wyche’s offense; it changed the game.

The Bengals only made the playoffs twice in this era, but that’s understating how good they were. They missed out in 1986 despite going 10-6. The 1987 strike season killed the no-huddle because Wyche was not about to teach that to a group of replacement players. In 1989, four of their eight losses were by a touchdown or less. In 1990, they did make the playoffs, but were missing Anthony Muñoz and other key starters for their divisional matchup with the Raiders — an absence which explains why Greg Townsend was able to sack Esiason three times in a 20-10 Cincinnati loss.

But no, the Bengals make this list because of 1988 and Super Bowl XXIII, a game in which the best Bengals team in DVOA history had the opportunity to get revenge for Super Bowl XVI and give Wyche a win over his old boss Bill Walsh. It did not go super well. Esiason was nursing an aching shoulder, forcing the Bengals to rely more heavily on their run game. Fullback Stanley Wilson ended up missing the game entirely after relapsing into cocaine addiction the night before the game, angering and upsetting the locker room and throwing a monkey wrench into the game plan. Tim Krumrie shattered his ankle in the first quarter, costing the Bengals a Pro Bowl defensive tackle. Despite all this, the Bengals took a 16-13 lead with 3:10 left in the game, pinning the 49ers all the way back to their own 8-yard line. All they had to do was stop Joe Montana and Jerry Rice from putting together one of the greatest drives in NFL history. Simple! 151 seconds later, John Taylor is running into the end zone celebrating, and the Bengals are vanquished once again.