Cool It On The Dynasty Talk
One of these days the people who say this are going to be right, but it’s far more likely they won’t be and we should stop predicting a dynasty before it exists.
I get why this happens every time a team wins a Super Bowl not named The Patriots. These fans have just witnessed their favorite team overcome the odds and become champions. You’re high on your own supply for a while after that (my condolences to fans of teams not fortunate enough to understand this high, I wish you could) and it feels like nothing matters because you’re the best and you proved it. But there have only been two dynasties since the realignment, and both have been the same team and in some ways could be considered one large dynasty. I consider the Pats one long dynasty with two major peaks of rule. But those damn Pats have broken everyone’s brains.
People see “Oh you got a great coach, and great quarterback, and some great skill players and you’ll compete” because that’s what the Pats have basically done but it really is hard to win multiple championships, even close together. The only team to truly come close to being another dynasty in the past two decades was the early 10’s Seahawks. They are the only ones to go to back-to-back bowls and almost won both. They haven’t even reached a championship game since. I’d personally consider the Seahawks the second best team of the decade after the Pats. It just goes to show how hard this winning it all thing really is. You need health, excellence, and luck all rolled into one run. The Packers had the best QB of the past decade and only won a single chip, and it was as underdog sneaks. The dominant 2011 team lost, they came close a few other times and lost each one. The Saints keep fucking it up in spectacular ways. The Steelers came close to being a dynasty but kept getting Foxboro’d into hell or crumbling at the wrong moment.
The Eagles seemed prime candidates for a new titan and boy did I see fans calling it. They were young. They were skilled as hell across the board. They had the young QB playing MVP ball on a rookie contract. The coach was being praised for big gutsy playstyle and skill. Two years later they basically made the playoffs by default thanks to a woeful division. The coach was questioned for half the season. The QB got paid mad bucks and had spent significant time hurt, to the point where his health is now always a concern. The young skill players have regressed. Old players have quit. They still have enough pieces in place to pull it together, but it feels like they got their chip and the window slammed back down on them and they now sit outside it pounding on the glass hoping they can brute force it again. The Eagles could win the NFCE for the next 4 seasons and never get past the divisional. They could win it all next year. But that dynasty didn’t happen.
Not only that, but the dynasty they proudly claimed to have ended just straight up went back and won another ring the next year. I can see the Pats doing it again this season too. Keep the D intact, protect Brady, grab another good skill player on offense, and hope to god Brady isn’t toast yet and they could be right back in it.
Do these Chiefs have that potential? All the contenders do. They have an amazing QB. They have a great coach. But they have to pay that QB soon. Not everyone is going to stick around. Fortune might not deliver them a 2nd seed next year and injuries could strike. One bad hit on a Mahomes scramble and it could go up in flames. The schedule might not work out in their favor. All of these things feel just as likely as a repeat. I’m happy for the Chiefs but until they win another SB in the next year or two, don’t crown them a dynasty.
This also makes me wonder what exactly defines a dynasty. Is it simply winning two championships back to back? Is Denver a late-90’s dynasty? What if you go to the championship 3 straight years but win the 1st and 3rd one, not back-to-back? Is it merely the act of winning multiple championships in a multi-year window with most of the roster intact for all of them a dynasty? Is simply the act of reaching the championship several years in succession or so considerable? The Bills reached 4 consecutive super bowls, something no other team has done. They didn’t win any, but if someone wanted to argue that was a sort of dynasty, I would hear that argument.
For what it’s worth though, I would be plenty content to never see a dynasty occur in any sport ever again.
I think a dynasty team is one that is the dominant force in the league for the better part of a decade. They don’t have to win every championship but they do have to be the clear favorites year after year.
Patriots are 14-1 right now to win it all. The odds aren’t bad for a futures bet
“Nobody gave us a chance!”
LMAO. Yeah. It is hard to pity my people.
The early 00s Seahawks? With Matt Hasself#ck and Soft Shaun? =/ That can’t be what you mean.
You’re referring to the mid-teens, not the early aughts. The ones from just a few wee years ago.
For me, a dynasty is – at minimum – 3 championships in a 5 year period or better. 2 in a row won’t do it alone.
Unless Dave edited the post, he said the “early 10’s” Seahawks.
He totally edited the post. That wanker!
I have to assume the Broncos are in this comic for completion’s sake because approximately zero people thought we’d continue to be a Super Bowl-caliber team the year after Manning left lol
truth
Was going to comment exactly that. ESPECIALLY after Osweiler left for Houston (which, y’know, kinda dodged a bullet there it turned out, but yeah, I didn’t really hear much dynasty talk after that win).
On that note: I don’t think of the late 90s Broncos as a dynasty. I personally think that a dynasty is winning 3 (or more) championships in a relatively narrow timeframe (because the 49ers in the 80s were a dynasty, but they weren’t winning every year).
I would consider the 90’s Bills as a dynasty level team. Championships excluded, how many teams in NFL history have been that successful? I think 4 or 5 years of consistently competing at the highest level and winning could qualify. I mean, those Bills owned the AFC those 4 years. So, I think it could count.
I think the 09 Saints could have done it if A) New Orleans wasn’t such a party town and B) Sean Payton would have put an end to Bountygate in 09 when the league asked them to.
Also – I’m not discrediting northern cities such as Boston as a party town, but they obviously have weather restrictions. February in New Orleans means 50 degree lows meaning there are no restrictions on debauchery.
After that 09 season, the city celebrated the Superbowl for two straight weeks with parades both weekends then had Madi Gras. Every single person on the team over 30 (most of the defense and offensive line) looked liked they had aged 10 years the following season. Even Jeremy Shockey couldn’t keep up and his body finally broke down. The Saints even had a decent couple of drafts, but it didn’t matter, the defense became one of the slowest and oldest units in the league, then after the Bountygate punishments, became one of the worst of all time.
Do you consider the early 2000s Eagles a dynasty too?
Dan Marino went his sophmore year and never returned to the big game.
Aaron Rodgers and Drew Brees are still waiting for their second Super Bowl appearance.
It’s hard just getting to the Supet Bowl.
The Seahawks are the only legit potential dynasty there (as they gave away their second Super Bowl). The rest (besides KC) were flukes (though NOLA should have gone and won two years ago, to make up for their Hank Baskett Super Bowl MVP year).
The only one of these to legit be close to a Dynasty was the Seahawks, with the Chiefs being to early to say right now.
Allow me to cut any grammar Nazis off at the pass and say in this context a ‘sports dynasty’ refers to sustained high achievement over a number of years. No succession is required. Context changes the meanings of words. Math is pure and universal; language is flexible and useful.
“Is Denver a late-90’s dynasty?”
Dave, Denver cheated – badly – to win both those Super Bowls. As far as I’m concerned, Atlanta and Green Bay were the best teams those seasons and fuck John Elway and his stupid horseface.
(They paid their players under the table so they could avoid salary cap issues, that’s why that team was so good, not because Elway finally “broke through”. I HATE the narrative that Elway somehow won those games; it was the fucking salary cap cheating.)
Also, yes, the Patriots are stained as well for their cheating but this is about Denver 🙂
It *really* irks me that the NFL doesn’t take stronger measures when they discover there was overt, definitive cheating in a Super Bowl. Titles should be vacated, examples should be made. In Denver’s case, Elway can keep his rings, but the record book should only say he has two voided Championships as a player. Then we can run around calling ol’ horseface a voider.
I’d take a few titles away from New England, too. Goodell’s entire response to that situation was infuriating. “Oh, these tapes? There’s… *nervous laugh* .. uhhh, there’s nothing on them. Instead of proving it by showing them to you, I’m just gonna, just gonna burn them. In my private incinerator. Because that’s what you do with evidence when it vindicates your position. *clears throat* Obviously.”
Bruh. “Paying under the table” is some Arena League shit. And honestly, since Elway ended Ironman Football in the OG Arena League (which is part of what killed it the first time IMO), I 100% want to believe it.
According to Your Team Cheats, the Denver Broncos are the biggest cheaters in the entire league. Some seriously dubious stuff here:
https://yourteamcheats.com/DEN
Your Team Cheats is biased as all get out. It’s run by a Patriots fan
=/ Seriously? Dammit. Just tell me it’s not run by Bill Simmons. TELL ME IT’S NOT HIM!!!!
It’s true it was put together by a Pats fan, but everything on that site has links to media sources verifying the claims.
You can argue about the relative severity of infractions and whether some things are cheating or not. But you can’t argue with the data.
Haven’t the Pats been paying Brady under the table to avoid the cap for years though? Or at least been paying into some dubious Brady-associated organizations. I mean, it’s the Patriots, if there is a gray area to exploit, they exploit it.
I like dynasties. Gives you someone to hate.
Please – all of you – just get over the cheating stuff, will you please? Hall of Famer Tony Hernandez went on the NFL Network and said ” we all cheat. We all push the envelope on every aspect of the game to gain an edge. What Denver did is way worse than anything the Pats ever did – and look it up. Even if you could prove Brady actually asked for deflated footballs, 1) Brady & Manning went to the League jointly and asked to have possession of the footballs before a game; 2) the rule book calls this an “equipment violation,” specifying a $25,000 fine. Instead Brady gets 4 games and the team is fined $1million? Finally, does anyone remember the 28-0 second half of that game after they put new balls into the game? All Pats haters are really getting lame. Brady – 9 Super Bowls in 18 full seasons as a starting QB. 6 rings… It will NEVER happen again, and he, Belichick and the team are the GOATS… If you don’t like it, go eat grass… Enough already…
They weren’t punished for deflating Bobby Kraft’s balls. They were punished for the LAAAAME cover-up (along with retroactive karmic punishment for when Goodell destroyed the evidence after SpyGate I). The man they referred to as “The Deflator” was given the name because he was on a diet?? That’s the BEST they could come up with? Brady also destroyed his phone and came up with lame excuses about that. Time to accept that Brady is a Super Bowl Champion***, a goat***, but most of all, he’s a cheetah. Ahhhhhhh! WOCKA WOCKA!
***Cheatah cheatah Uggs on his feetah
Oh boy! Let’s rerererere-litigate ballghazi! No really, the one thing I’d like to say about it is that if my employer demanded my personal phone, I’d tell em to go get fucked, as should everyone.
Bad analogy. Your employer wants your personal phone that you conducted company business on… company business that is currently being investigated with repercussions.
Regardless, appeal failed, asterisk is final. When our universe dies, our sun flames out, and everything on this planet is baked to a crisp, the final dying gasps of our historical record blowing across the barren landscape – moments before bursting into flames and vanishing with the remains of the planet into eternal darkness – will read… “Tom Brady* won 6 Super Bowls and lost 3,” with a small line below it – “* Known cheater”.
i have a scheduling app on my phone for work, does that then entitle my boss unfettered access to all of its functions? fuck that. your employer doesn’t own you. yet.
In the equivalent scenario – not a scheduling app, but conducting actual business that can’t be otherwise examined unless you fork over your phone – then yes, I would expect destroying the phone and refusing to hand it over would be used against you.
I’m all for privacy, but conducting business on your phone with no other record of it anywhere? I’m no lawyer, but it seems very obvious to me that you could lose the right to claim privacy in an investigation. There’s a lesson here, kiddos. Don’t zig when you should have zagged.
The “Everyone else is doing it!” defense isn’t a particularly good one.
I’d say 3 championships in a 5 year period can be called a dynasty. 2 years in a row is special, but if nothing happens within 2 years of that, it isn’t a sustained level of high play.
I experienced the crushing pain of defeat once. What’s the high feel like?
…was anyone really thinking that the Broncos were gonna be a dynasty? That was maybe the end of one. If they’d beaten Seattle before, I could see that, but that was Manning’s final year, and yeah, the defense carried, but can only carry so far. I legit don’t recall hearing “dynasty” after that one.
Yeah, the rhetoric was never “are the Broncos a dynasty?”, it was “are the 2015 Broncos comparable to the 85 Bears/00 Ravens?”. Everyone knew it was over at that point, it was a question of legacy.
A dynasty is 3 championships with the same coach, QB, and core players in 5-6 year period. Maybe even a decade just because it would be amazing to keep a core of players together that long in today’s game.
It used to be 4 championships in a decade because of the 70s Steelers and 80s Niners. Then the Cowboys got 3 in 5 years in the 90s, and we all said the dynasty years were gone because of the salary cap. The Pats first dynasty proved that wouldn’t be true, but no quite the same. They missed the playoffs after winning a SB.
Then the Pats figured out how to handle the cap like no other franchise, and Brady just kept getting better.
People will talk about the Pats 100 years from now.
I’m a Chiefs fan and I would absolutely love a dynasty but I’ve only ever said that in a joking fashion. The salary cap was established to stop the dynasties of old from persisting in the modern NFL. Look at every Super Bowl game since the beginning. Majority of them have the Steelers, the Cowboys, the Packers, the 49ers, and during the 90s, the Broncos.
Pick any two of those teams and seven random Super Bowls. You’ll probably get at least one or two hits. It’s why everybody still hates the Yankees. You can only win for so long before everybody but the most die hard of fans want you to just go away. It’s why everybody except some Massholes got fucking stoked when the Titans knocked the Pats out, because we’re fucking sick of Tom Brady and the Patriots.
As a fun experiment I decided to just pick 5 Super Bowls and picked the Steelers and Cowboys. I went real simple. With X, XX, XXX, XL, and L, I got 5 hits and X and XXX were BOTH Steelers-Cowboys. XL was Steelers-Seahawks.
But hey, if a joke can somehow move the butterfly wings of fate into turning Patrick Mahomes from a MVP to the next football dynasty king…I’m all for that.
Since the salary cap era started in 1994, only one SB-winning qb took up more than 13% of the cap, and that was in 1994. Only 7 out of 25 times has a the winning qb taken up more than 10% of the team’s cap.
There will never be another dynasty unless a team can do it while their qb is on their rookie deal, or they take a *very* team-friendly deal. Because once the qb signs their megadeal, it screws the rest of the team.
If Mahomes gets $40 mil/year, which will be 20% of the cap next year, KC is going nowhere.
Also – 4 of the 7 QBs who took up more than 10% of their team’s cap are P. Manning and Brady. So maybe if Mahomes becomes one of the greatest qb’s of all time, KC will have a chance at a dynasty.
The only other one since 1996 is Eli, in 2011 and that took a miracle play.
Qb’s that didn’t win the SB this year:
1. Tom Brady (over 14% of the cap)
2. Aaron Rodgers (over 14%)
3. Kirk Cousins (over 15%)
4. Matt Stafford (over 15%)
5. Andrew Luck (over 14%)
6. Russell Wilson (over 13%)
I should probably fact-check all of these before being impressed, but I’m lazy. Sooooo… assuming all of these #s are accurate, this is some *REALLY* great stuff!
Did you do all this research yourself, or find it somewhere? It’s a great angle to look at. You just won yourself a box of virtual kudos granola bars, my man.
I got most of this by googling around, I didn’t fact-check most of it either. Most of the data came from spotrac.com or overthecap.com, which are reputable.
https://overthecap.com/super-bowl-titles-high-salary-quarterbacks/
https://www.reddit.com/r/nfl/comments/af283d/percentage_of_salary_cap_taken_up_by_super_bowl/
Win 3 Super Bowls minimum with the same core of players/coaches, that’s the definition of dinasty for me. What the Pats had done in 20 years is unprecedent and probably we will never witness anything like that again, hell, without the 2008 Giants the GOAT debate would have ended then and maybe Brady would have retired sooner.
So about this…