With four-team divisions and only a handful of regular-season games compared to other pro sports, nobody does worst to first like the NFL. Since the league moved to 32 teams and the eight-division format in 2002, 19 teams have gone from the bottom of the division in one season to the top of the division the following year. That's 19 teams in 19 years. Do some quick math and you'll find that means we can expect an average of one team per year to go from the bottom of the division to the top. (I'm not including five teams that finished only third in their divisions because they won tiebreakers.)
Even that number undersells how frequently teams rise up from the doldrums of the NFL. The 2012 Chiefs finished with the worst record in football; after hiring Andy Reid, they went from 2-14 to 11-5 and made it to the playoffs the following season. The 2018 49ers finished 4-12 -- the second-worst record in football then -- but the only team worse than Kyle Shanahan's happened to be the Cardinals, so the Niners finished third in the NFC West. One year later, they went 13-3 and made it to Super Bowl LIV.
Who will be that team in 2021? Let's run through the NFL's eight last-place finishers from last season and rank them in order of likelihood that they'll go worst to first in 2021. First, though, I'll start by going through six common trends that have popped up in looking through the résumés of teams that have done this in the past.
Jump to a team:
ATL | CIN | DET | DEN
JAX | NYJ | PHI | SF
