Dorktown Presents: The unlikeliest Super Bowl champions of all time (Patreon)

At the end of every NFL season, a Super Bowl Champion is crowned. Generally the team that ends up hoisting the Vince Lombardi Trophy makes plenty of sense, a team that by-and-large rampaged through the league that season, leaving little doubt as to their bona fides for their coronation. But there are certainly exceptions. Sometimes opportunities stem from factors out of their control such as injuries or officiating, sometimes from the proverbial bounce of the ball that could swing a playoff game, opening the door for a team with underlying metrics that wouldn’t ordinarily portend such glory to defy the odds, etc. But whatever the reason, the exceptions exist.

So who are the unlikeliest/flukiest champs? For many, a couple that might immediately jump to mind are the New York Giants’ two Super Bowl wins over the New England Patriots to cap the 2007 & 2011 seasons. The former was a 10-win David slaying an undefeated Goliath in the wake of one of the most famous and absurd plays ever, and the latter remains the only seven-loss team to ever get their mitts on the Lombardi. And the argument for those two Giants titles is bolstered by taking a look at point differential.

Before we hone in on the point differential of Super Bowl participants, though, let’s look at a snapshot of every team-season of the Super-Bowl era, in which – as you’d expect – there’s an awfully strong positive correlation between point differential & winning:

Some noteworthy exceptions there being the 2010 Seahawks emerging as a division champ of the dumpster fire that was the NFC West whilst boasting the league’s 5th-worst point differential while the ‘91 Niners missed out despite the league’s 2nd-best point differential, even in an era of three Wild Cards.

A more nuanced look at team success reinforces the strong positive correlation, but also unearths another few gems:

Look at those ‘81 Pats! They went 2-14 despite a better point differential (-48) than the 10-win, playoff-making ‘21 Raiders (in addition to these other obscured playoff squads, which includes the ‘21 Steelers, meaning not one but multiple of 2021’s seven AFC playoff squads were arguably fundamentally worse than a 2-14 squad from 40 years prior).

Those conference-winning ‘24 Chiefs stand out as a 15-2 team with a +59 point differential, 12 points worse than the ‘81 Falcons who finished with a losing record. Since KC completely laid down in a meaningless 38-point loss in their finale, we could pretend that game simply didn’t happen. In that case you’d be looking at a 15-1 team with a +97 point differential, which would be quite a bit worse than that of the ‘89 Bengals, who went .500.

And shout out to those ‘22 Vikings who went 13-4 despite allowing more points than they scored. Compare that to the ‘71 Bengals, who scored 19 points more than they allowed and for their trouble got a 4-10 record out of it. But by and large, the correlation between the two is obvious. Now let’s look at what can be gleaned from how every conference champ fared in the Super Bowl:

Not only are those two Giants squads the lowest among the winners with no one else close, but there are only three losers in their vicinity. The 2007 quirkiness gets taken to another level when accounting for their opponent being the all-time single-season point differential king, while their 2011 iteration represented not just the worst mark of any club to reach – let alone win – the Super Bowl, but was actually in the negatives.

A champion who allowed more points than they scored throughout the regular season (with the Niner fan in me compelled to lament in that NFC Championship game what turned out to be a larger butterfly effect than anyone could’ve imagined when return specialist Ted Ginn Jr. had gotten hurt the prior week). And they needed a late-season surge to even get close to a break-even number:

Through Week 15, the eventual hoisters of the Lombardi were .500 with a worse point differential than not one but multiple squads (Panthers, Dolphins) who’d go on to earn top-10 picks in the subsequent draft. Even at the end of the season their point differential was worse than a 6-10 Dolphins squad quarterbacked by Matt Moore, in addition to those aforementioned 4-10 ‘71 Bengals plus a few other squads who lost at least ⅔ of their games.

Now to shift gears and explore the champs based on total yardage differential – or yards gained by the offense minus yards allowed by the defense – where another flabbergasting Cinderella emerges. While not as determinative or predictive a metric as point differential, it’s not too difficult to see that there does still remain a strong positive correlation between superiority in conquering terrain & winning:

There the biggest exceptions would be the ‘89 Steelers – who made the playoffs despite a point differential that was both the very worst in the league that season and over 600 yards worse than any other playoff team except the ‘10 Seahawks – and the ‘10 Chargers. In generating 1,984 more yards of offense than their defense allowed, San Diego produced a differential over 870 yards better than the runner-up that season (a Giants team that coincidentally also missed the playoffs), over 300 yards better than any other team to miss the playoffs, and the coup de grâce: the 3rd-highest mark there period.

And here it is plotted by games above .500:

While quadrants I & III remain far more densely populated than II & IV, we still get our lovely exceptions. My favorite is the winless ‘17 Browns being over 400 yards better than the 13-3 ‘84 Broncos and not all that far off from the 15-1 ‘11 Packers, whose abundance of laissez-faire 4th quarters when protecting huge leads contributed to a figure nearly 600 yards worse than the 2-14 ‘13 Texans. As for the performance in this metric by squads that reached Super Sunday:

Look at those ‘01 Pats! Despite being a 2-seed to earn a playoff bye week, they had a total yardage differential nearly 500 yards below zero when no other conference champ (let alone Super Bowl champ) except the ‘93 Bills was below zero period. In fact, among every NFL team in 2001, they had the 7th-worst standing, worse than bottom-feeders like the 3-13 Bills & Dave Campo Cowboys:

Not only that, the Rams squad they faced for all the marbles just so happened to reside atop the Super-Bowl era’s single-season total yardage differential list. And despite that juxtaposition, those feisty Patriots pulled off the victory. Even more bizarre, in the game itself it was more of their same season-long trends, with New England getting outgained by 160 yards, ranking #105 out of the 116 participants, and the very worst among the winners:

So the conference champ with by far the worst regular-season total yardage differential just so happened to face the conference champ with by far the best regular-season total yardage differential, got their ass kicked as to yardage gained in said matchup, and still won. Think this might sum it up best:

That '01 Pats playoff run was quite memorable and unlikely for multiple reasons, as it was made possible in their first game by one of the all-time controversial calls followed by one of the all-time miraculous kicks. Also somewhat amusing was that their offense actually only scored three touchdowns throughout that postseason while their defense allowed five. Granted, thanks to three non-offensive TDs, their six total TDs scored were ultimately (just one) more than they allowed. But more amusing was two years later.

The '03 Patriots managed to somehow win the Super Bowl despite a postseason in which they scored seven total touchdowns and allowed eight. There is no other season for which this can even be close to replicated for a Super Bowl champ:

And last but not least, we’ll take a glance at turnover differential, which any fan of football has heard approximately 47 kajillion times from broadcasts, interviews, press conferences, etc., how vital that metric is to winning. How coaches constantly harp on the message of how crucial it is to avoid giving the ball away while also capitalizing on opportunities to take it away. How after games the losing team nearly always laments and cites the turnover differential when a negative mark occurs in conjunction with a loss. Which, again, largely true:

Well Washington sorta broke the chart in 1983 with only 18 giveaways against a whopping 61 takeaways. But aside from that, here the big exceptions are the ‘99 Chiefs leading the league that season at +21 and missing the playoffs in a time with three Wild Cards, and the ‘04 Rams making the playoffs despite a turnover differential so bad that since 1990 no one but the ‘00 Chargers (Ryan Leaf at quarterback), ‘17 Browns (zero wins), and ‘18 Niners (defense picked off two passes all season) ever plunged to deeper depths.

Interestingly enough, of the five worst turnover differentials by playoff teams, another also occurred in ‘04 when the Packers won the NFC North despite a turnover differential of -14. That means not one but multiple of 2004’s six NFC playoff squads had a turnover differential worse than any NFL team in 2022, where Indy brought up the rear at -13. Hell, in ‘95 the worst the league had to offer was the Broncos at -9. As for how it manifested itself in win-loss record:

The strong correlation remains, but gotta love 1971 featuring not one but multiple squads (Bengals, Saints) with a turnover differential at least as good as the undefeated ‘07 Pats and still managing to lose at least twice as many games as they won. Remarkable. The 1-15 ‘01 Panthers being in the positives – and way better than the aforementioned 14-2 ‘01 Rams – is pretty great. And the ‘87 Bears going 11-4 despite a per-game turnover differential of -1.33 might be the most outrageous of ‘em all.

As for the turnover differential of conference champs, surprisingly enough we get the same element of serendipity as we saw from total yardage differential:

From the ‘83 season, we again see the conference champ with the worst mark – fueled by an epic 5-game stretch that produced a -20 when no other Super-Bowl era team-season except the ‘75 Falcons dropped below -17, not to mention being 33% worse than any other playoff (let alone Super Bowl) team – and the conference champ with the best mark occurring in the same year and thus facing each other in the same Super Bowl. And in that Super Bowl XVIII there was a plot twist: the cellar-dwelling Raiders emerged +1 against the far-and-away all-time turnover differential kings en route to beating the snot out of Washington.

So all in all the two Tom Coughlin/Eli Manning Giants titles and the first Bill Belichick/Tom Brady Patriots title certainly appear, among all the Super-Bowl winners, to be the strongest candidates in a game of “which of these is not like the others;” the least-likely & least-qualified teams to have ultimately wound up as the last one standing, especially when factoring in some of their particularly memorable breaks. But hey, you can’t take away just how impressive it is for a team to not be impressive and still somehow butt its way into championship glory.