Across the past 25 years, the NFL’s 32 franchises have combined to play 798 team seasons of football. That’s 6,447 regular-season games and 285 playoff games. In short, a lot of football has happened.
So how to distill all that down into a field of 32 teams, with the goal of ultimately crowning the best squad of the quarter century? It wasn’t easy.
Sure, there are some teams that are no-brainers, like the dominant Super Bowl champions or the 2007 Patriots. But where do you draw the line? Are the 2011 Giants in the mix just because they got hot and won the big game? (We opted against including them.) Should any 49ers team be part of the bracket when they never once hoisted a Lombardi? (We ultimately honored the 2023 squad.) How many Patriots teams do we need really? (We landed on five.) Who was better, the 2010 Packers, who went 10-6 but won the Super Bowl, or the 2011 Packers, who stormed through the league to a 15-1 record only to face-plant in the divisional round against the very same Giants we excluded? (Haha, sike—we decided we didn’t want to answer this and left it up to you readers with an all-cheese first-round matchup.)
Weeks ago, we asked our NFL staffers to submit nominations for this bracket. We had nine experts, and a total of 64 teams received nominations. We’re publishing the full list here:
Best NFL Team of the Quarter Century Nominations
Those are the nominees. From there, a select group of editors made decisions about who to include in the final bracket, as well as where to seed those teams. How did we make those decisions? These three takeaways can shed light on our thinking:
The Biggest Snub: The 2003 New England Patriots
Eight of our nine voters nominated the 2003 Patriots, yet we chose to exclude them. A shocking snub! There are three reasons why we ultimately sidelined the 2003 Patriots:
- We already have five Patriots teams on this list. Do we really need another? You seriously want more Patriots? The Patriots were the franchise of the quarter century—no one disputes that—but at a certain point, you hit Boston saturation. A total of 11 different Patriots teams were nominated: the five we chose for the bracket (2001, 2004, 2007, 2014, and 2016), plus six more we cut (2003, 2010, 2011, 2012, 2017, and 2018). Some decisions had to be made. Sorry to the Boston sports mafia (but not really sorry—you folks truly have nothing to complain about).
- The 2003 Patriots are kinda, sorta already covered by the 2004 Patriots. We tried to avoid too much overlap between teams from the same era (with the notable exception of the 2010 and 2011 Packers, a stress test for how our readers will value regular vs. postseason success that was too juicy to ignore). That’s why we have the 2013 Seahawks but not the 2014 Seahawks. It’s why we have the 2022 Chiefs but not the 2023 Chiefs. You get it. We wanted some variety.
- Patriots superfan Justin Sayles was the only expert not to nominate them. This man has spilled more ink about Boston sports, the Patriots, Tom Brady, and Bill Belichick than just about anyone else on our staff. If the 2003 Patriots aren’t good enough for him, then that is enough said.
The Franchises With Zero Teams in the Bracket
The Patriots took up a lot of oxygen, but they weren’t the only franchise to be included multiple times. Three Ravens teams made the cut (2000, 2012, and 2019), and the Eagles (2017 and 2024), Buccaneers (2002 and 2020), Packers (2010 and 2011), Chiefs (2019 and 2022), Colts (2006 and 2009), Broncos (2013 and 2015), and Steelers (2005 and 2008) all got two teams in the mix. That means that a lot of franchises didn’t make the bracket. These are those organizations:
- Atlanta Falcons
- Minnesota Vikings
- Arizona Cardinals
- Miami Dolphins
- New York Jets
- Washington Commanders
- Dallas Cowboys
- Cincinnati Bengals
- Cleveland Browns
- Chicago Bears
- Houston Texans
- Tennessee Titans
- Jacksonville Jaguars
- Las Vegas Raiders
At least the Falcons (2016), Vikings (2009 and 2017), and Cardinals (2015) received some nominations. These 11 franchises got completely blanked in our nominations process. I think there are two ways to read this.
One is as a demonstration of how high the bar is to be one of the best teams in a 25-year period. The 2021 Bengals beat the Chiefs to make a Super Bowl and lost that game by just three points, and not one person thought they were even worthy of a nomination. Most of the squads that were nominated had something truly special about them.
The second way to read it is as a demonstration of how sticky success (or lack of success) can be in the NFL. And it’s not just about a great quarterback or even head coach. Some of the franchises with multiple nominations did so across totally different eras. Take the Ravens, Rams, Buccaneers, and Eagles as examples—those squads were largely different in all their iterations. If your favorite team was completely left out of this process, you may want to look to your owner or front office (although you probably already knew that).
The Super Bowl Winners That Missed the Bracket
Should every Super Bowl winner have been included in the final bracket? This question dogged us from the beginning of this project. On the one hand, Lombardi Trophies trump everything. Sports are a results-oriented pursuit, and championships are the entire point. So to what extent can you cut a team that won it all in favor of one that didn’t?
On the other hand, including all the Super Bowl winners by default would’ve taken up 25 of 32 spots, leaving us with just seven spaces for non-champs. That didn’t feel right. Plus, let’s face it, some Super Bowl champions just weren’t all that impressive or memorable beyond their win in February. So with that in mind, we cut four Super Bowl champions:
- 2023 Chiefs. We already included both the 2019 and 2022 Chiefs and didn’t feel the need to add a third Patrick Mahomes squad. Especially since the 2022 team (1) has a ton of overlap in terms of roster and (2) was objectively much more impressive, meaning we didn’t feel like we were losing much with this cut.
- 2018 Patriots. This team is memorable for completely breaking the Jared Goff–Sean McVay Rams, but ultimately, with an 11-5 regular-season record and just three nominations from our voters, it fell well short of other Patriots squads.
- 2003 Patriots. As covered above, they were our biggest snub, but we had sound reasons.
- 2011 Giants. We had room for only one slightly above-average Super Bowl–winning Giants squad, and that spot went to the 2007 team, for obvious reasons. Just two voters nominated the 2011 Giants, and it was two people who decided that all Super Bowl winners should get in by default. In other words, no one went out of their way to nominate the 2011 Giants, and with good reason—at 9-7 and with literally a negative regular-season point differential, they were by far the worst team considered by virtually every metric.
