The Titans signed Ryan Tannehill in 2019 and for about two and a half years they were a problem. An AFC Championship Game, a number one seed, Derrick Henry running through the back of people’s souls. Then it stopped. They’ve finished last in the division three years running and its certainly on the board, they do it again. The good years just run out…
Which got me thinking about something I’ve believed for a long time, basically since I started watching. A good NFL team is good for about five years. Not five years of winning it all, that’s a different and much shorter list. Five years of mattering. You make a Super Bowl once in there, you get to a conference title game a couple of times, and even in the down years you’re a real playoff team. Then it closes and you spend a while in the wilderness.
To measure it you need a way to score a season that isn’t just wins, because 11-6 and out in the wild card is not the same as 11-6 and a bye. There’s a medal system for this, the kind Nick Wright has used on TV, and I borrowed it. Win the Super Bowl, gold, three points. Lose it, silver, two, which is the same as winning your conference. Win a playoff game but no Super Bowl, bronze, one. Make the playoffs and lose your first game, half a point. Miss entirely, nothing. Every team, every season from 1999 through 2025, best result only, added up.
The Medal Count
The Patriots aren’t just first, they’re a rounding error from lapping the field. Thirty-three points, six rings, all from Tom Brady. Behind them is are the Eagles, Seahawks, Chiefs, Steelers and Ravens, all bunched in the high teens. And down at 15th, with a single silver and a lot of gray, are my Titans, whose one Super Bowl appearance came all the way back in 1999. Meanwhile, the Patriots didn’t get five years. They got twenty.
How Long the Good Times Last
The ranking tells you who was good. It doesn’t tell you how long anybody stayed that way, which is the actual question. So here’s every team’s contention windows, a window being a run of playoff seasons that survives a single down year, laid out across the whole stretch. Each bar is one window, colored by the best they did in it, and a star marks a title.
A few things jump out. The Patriots are one uninterrupted 21-year slab, which isn’t a window, it was a tradition. And after a few down years, they were right back in the Super Bowl last year. We'll see what level of success follows. The Colts are basically the Peyton Manning administration, sixteen straight, and then a wall. But look at the middle and the bottom and you see the real pattern. Teams stack a good three to six year run, fall off, and if they’re lucky come back for another one later. The Eagles are the cleanest example. Their longest run, 2000 to 2010, only got them to a Super Bowl. Both of their rings came in a completely separate window that started in 2017. Same story with the Rams, the Bucs, and the Giants, two title windows each, years apart. Almost nobody won everything in one long breath. Sort the league by its longest window and it splits cleanly into three groups. Ten franchises built at least one nine-year era, thirteen topped out somewhere in the five-to-eight range, and nine never put together more than four good years in a row before the bottom fell out. That bottom group is mostly what you’d guess, the Browns and the Lions, but it also holds the Giants, who won two Super Bowls without ever stringing together more than four straight good years.
Nobody Gets Five Clean Years
Here’s where my theory takes a hit. I went looking for the actual five-year runs, teams that won a playoff game five years in a row, and there basically aren’t any.
Since 1999 there have been more than a hundred little streaks of a team winning a playoff game in consecutive years. Eighty-three of them are one year and done. Only seven ever reached five straight, and the only franchise to do it twice is New England. Even the good ones blink. They win a game in January, then the next year they trip in the wild-card round or go 9-8 and miss, and the streak dies.
And the down half of the cycle is worse than people remember. The Browns went the better part of two decades between playoff wins. The good window might be five-ish. The bad one can run a lot longer than five.
So How Long Is a Team Good?
So the five-and-five was close, but a little too strict. Here’s what the data actually supports. The good years come in short windows for most teams, and for a normal good team that window runs somewhere between four and six seasons, and you’ll have a down year in the middle you just have to survive, because hardly anyone strings five clean ones together. A handful of teams, the Patriots for two decades, the Chiefs recently, the Eagles across two separate eras, simply refuse to leave, which is the whole reason everybody else is chasing them. And the dark times on the other side are usually much longer than the good times were.
So Where’s Your Team?
Which makes the fun part, if you’re a fan, figuring out where your own team is sitting in the cycle right now. For the teams that actually contend, a run tends to last three to five years, and if it’s a real one it gets you at least a conference title game, usually a Super Bowl trip somewhere in the middle of it. Once you know the shape, you can roughly place yourself.
If your team has been bad for a while, genuinely bad, that’s not the gut-punch it feels like. The cycle turns. The bottom of the league is exactly where the next good window tends to start, and if you’ve been buried for a few years you’re probably closer to the upswing than the standings make it look.
Now, some teams don’t really get a cycle. A few franchises have just been bad, more or less the whole time. The Browns have one playoff win this entire century, and they shipped that guy out of town. For a guy who hadn't played for two years and they gave him a quarter billion dollars. So you can see why some teams are where they are on the list. The Raiders and the Cardinals each got exactly one real run, the Raiders to a Super Bowl in 2002 and the Cardinals to one in 2008, and not much of anything on either side of it. If that’s your team, this cycle stuff doesn’t mean a lot. The upswing has to actually show up, and for a few of these places it just hasn’t in a very long time.
If you’re an Eagles fan, you’re in the rare seat where you can pencil in some kind of success almost every year. A playoff berth at worst, a deep run at best, a ring every so often, even in the seasons it doesn’t all come together. That is not normal, and it does not last forever, so enjoy it while the window’s open.
And then there’s the middle, the teams sitting right on the hinge. If you’re a Saints fan you’re hoping the cycle is finally swinging back your way, with Tyler Shough as the reason it does. Same exact energy in Tennessee, last in the division a few years running now, hoping Cam Ward is the guy who drags them back onto the upswing. And if you’re a Vikings fan, you’re running the nervous version of this math, hoping last year was a blip and not the front end of a down cycle you’re already a year into.
You get a couple of real cracks at it. And then, more often than not, the floor drops out faster than anybody wants to admit. The good times are shorter than the theory, and a lot shorter than the memory.