To celebrate the first 25 NFL seasons of the 21st century, we at The Ringer have assigned you an impossible task: decide which team of this quarter century was the best. We’ve already whittled the field down to 32 entrants (that’s down to eight as of Wednesday) and seeded them into a bracket. From there, it’s on you.
The truth is, there’s no right answer in this exercise. My first instinct is to favor the more modern teams, who have access to numerous advancements in technology, strategy, and player development. But that might be a flawed approach. Sure, it’s hard to imagine a 240-pound Ray Lewis and his bulky shoulder pads staying with Tyreek Hill on a deep crossing route, but what if we played using a rule book from the early part of the century? Lewis and his teammates would be free to push the undersized speedster around without fear of drawing an illegal contact penalty. And if Hill got through that, he’d have to worry about a safety lurking over the top, looking to take his head off with a hit that would be fined today but two decades ago would have been celebrated in a SportsCenter highlight package. If the 2000 Ravens took on the 2019 Chiefs with today’s rules, it wouldn’t be much of a contest. But what if we supplied that Baltimore group with all the modern amenities—improved training facilities, more comfortable travel arrangements, advances in technology to aid game prep, nutrition plans catered to individual players—that teams enjoy today? That would level the playing field a bit.
Football has undergone significant changes over the past 25 years. Players are bigger, faster, and stronger than ever before. Schemes are more sophisticated and varied. Offenses have shifted from a run-first approach designed for tight spaces to a more spread-out, pass-happy style that’s built on speed and precision. Defenses have countered by getting smaller and quicker, and they’ve changed their techniques to grapple with a rule book that has been rewritten to encourage scoring. Despite what older generations of fans might say, the quality of play has never been better—but that doesn’t mean we can discount the great teams of the early aughts. It was their dominance and influence that molded the sport into its current form. And without consideration of the changes that the league has undergone over the past 25 years—and the teams that inspired those changes—we can’t properly determine which team deserves to be crowned as the greatest.
The Best NFL Team of the Quarter Century Bracket
The story of the NFL’s past quarter century starts with the “Greatest Show on Turf” Rams, but that 1999 team is more of a prologue than a first chapter. The offense was led by Kurt Warner, Marshall Faulk, Isaac Bruce, and Torry Holt and coordinated by Mike Martz—a member of Don Coryell’s coaching tree who would take over as head coach following the team’s Super Bowl triumph that season. The Coryell philosophy was known for the deep passing game and creating explosive plays, and Martz’s Rams teams perfected that art.
Martz’s first team, the 2000 Rams, still holds the highest explosive play rate of any team this century at 16.5 percent, per TruMedia. The 2001 group, the lone representative of the Greatest Show on Turf era in our bracket, is tied for the second-highest rate. Those Rams picked up yardage in chunks, and if that meant taking a few more sacks and throwing more interceptions, so be it. Across the first two years of Martz’s head coaching tenure, the Rams turned it over a league-leading 79 times! For context, the Browns are the only team that has committed more than 55 turnovers in the past two seasons combined. The Rams coughed the ball up at a ridiculous rate. And with the coach’s proclivity for five-man protections and deep passes, Warner took a lot of hits. But that didn’t stop the Rams from lighting up the scoreboard and leading the league in points. It was a boom-or-bust operation, and it boomed a lot more than it busted.
During its historic three-year run, the GSOT had two direct rivals: the Buccaneers and Eagles. Tony Dungy’s Bucs, known for their Tampa 2 coverage, were equipped to take away explosive plays by dropping two safeties deep and using rangy linebackers to patrol the middle of the field. With their dominant defensive front, the Bucs were also able to slow down Faulk without loading the box with an extra run defender. The Eagles, whose defense was coordinated by Jim Johnson, took a more aggressive approach but achieved similar results. Johnson was an avid blitzer who went after St. Louis’s five-man protections with creative fronts. Warner had a quick trigger as a passer, but Johnson’s defenses forced him to get the ball out even faster than he was used to. In an opening week matchup in 2001, Philadelphia’s blitz packages broke the Rams’ protections, leading to several direct hits on Warner. The Fox cameras caught a shot of the Rams sideline scrambling for answers.
The Rams were still able to win their postseason wars with the Bucs and Eagles, but those defenses laid out a blueprint for how to slow St. Louis down. And as injuries piled up for Warner and Faulk, Martz’s offense lost its edge. The Rams remained effective over the next few seasons with Marc Bulger at quarterback, but they never reached the heights of those early days.
Unsurprisingly, the rest of the league started adopting the defensive strategies of Tampa and Philly. Dungy’s Tampa 2 defense was the more popular approach, as it wasn’t as risky. Even the Rams turned to that style, hiring Lovie Smith away from Dungy’s staff in 2001, which helped them get back to the Super Bowl that season. At that time, offenses were generally still built around the run game and shot plays in the passing game. They weren’t equipped to go on long, painstaking drives, and the bend-but-don’t-break style of defense forced them to do just that. Johnson’s units did a lot more breaking than bending, but the knee-jerk reaction from offenses was the same: get the ball out quickly before the pocket collapses. Even when the Eagles’ pass rush wasn’t getting home, it was forcing quick, short passes.
This also coincided with the rise of Bill Belichick’s Patriots, who killed off the Rams mini-dynasty in Super Bowl XXXVI using a game plan built around physical coverage and beating up Faulk. Belichick unleashed a similar approach against Peyton Manning’s Colts in the 2003 playoffs, to the point that Indianapolis’s front office later got a rule enacted that tamped down on how physical defensive backs were allowed to be. That opened up the short passing game and sparked a passing revolution across the league. Long drives became easier to sustain, and as the NFL entered a golden age of quarterbacking—with Manning, Tom Brady, Drew Brees, Philip Rivers, Ben Roethlisberger, and Aaron Rodgers rising to stardom—the bend-don’t-break defense fell out of favor.
Belichick did plenty of complaining about the rule changes and the havoc they wreaked on defenses, but that didn’t stop him from adapting. The Patriots poured more resources into the offense and were the first team to lean into a spread passing game in 2007. At the time, teams were still lining up under center and regularly playing a fullback. That unforgettable Pats group, which famously won its first 18 games before losing to Eli Manning and the Giants in the Super Bowl, started the shift toward shotgun-based offenses with three-receiver sets. Brady was the perfect shepherd for this new style of offense: He rarely made mental mistakes and had the precision to sustain long drives. And his wide receiver corps was ideal for this system. Randy Moss required constant safety help, which made it easier for Brady to diagnose the defense before the snap. And Wes Welker was a reliable possession receiver who exploited matchups against linebackers and box safeties. This was before the nickel cornerback became a fixture in starting lineups, and teams just didn’t have the athletes to hang with a true spread attack.
The 2007 Pats were impossible to defend and broke all sorts of offensive records en route to a perfect regular season, but the offense wasn’t a very explosive unit. While Brady and Moss connected on a number of deep passes, the team at large relied on a quick game underneath and finished with an explosive play rate of just 10.4 percent, which ranks 468th since 2000, per TruMedia. This wasn’t the same approach that the GSOT Rams took to lighting up the scoreboard, even if the results were similar. But like those Rams teams, the Patriots’ spread passing attack inspired copycats across the league and sparked an offensive revolution that would last for the next decade-plus.
That again meant defenses needed a new approach, and we saw those changes start to take place as early as 2007. That season’s Giants were the only team able to beat the Patriots, but a few others challenged them along the way. The Ravens’ Week 13 loss in particular gave us the first sign of how defenses would have to evolve. Rex Ryan was Baltimore’s defensive coordinator at the time, and though his underdog team lost, he put together one of the best game plans you will ever see. Baltimore’s aim was to get New England in third-and-long by any means necessary. Sometimes that meant sending an early-down blitz to generate a tackle for loss in the run game; sometimes it meant dropping eight into coverage and flooding the underneath areas to take away the quick passing game. And when the Ravens did manage to force a third-and-long, Ryan threw some wicked curveballs, which included wonky defensive fronts and well-disguised coverages. Brady, who was at the peak of his powers, managed a game-winning drive to steal the win late, but he looked uncomfortable all night and never quite found a rhythm.
The Giants took a similar approach in the Super Bowl. Defensive coordinator Steve Spagnuolo didn’t need to get too creative with his blitzes thanks to a pass rush spearheaded by Michael Strahan and Osi Umenyiora, but he cooked up enough wild coverages to keep Brady guessing and give the rush time to get home. Those performances were enough to earn Ryan and Spagnuolo head coaching jobs, but neither found sustained success in that role—mostly due to crappy quarterback play. Ryan’s Jets defenses were fixtures atop the league’s statistical charts throughout his tenure, but Spagnuolo’s Rams rosters didn’t have the talent or experience to effectively employ his scheme. Had their teams been more successful, they may have inspired more copycats, and the passing revolution that took place over the next decade may have been stifled.
Instead, teams reverted to a bend-but-don’t-break style of defense, only with more speed on the field. That eventually gave rise to Pete Carroll’s Legion of Boom unit in Seattle. The Seahawks were known for their Cover 3 defense, which wasn’t too different from Dungy’s Tampa 2 system. “The Seattle 3 is the same thing to me as Tampa 2,” 49ers head coach Kyle Shanahan explained during a 2020 podcast appearance. “It was a two-deep shell, but that [linebacker] was running down the middle, which makes it three deep.”
The coverage plays out in similar ways, just with different position types ending up in the same general spots on the field. Instead of a linebacker being responsible for the deep middle, it was all-world safety Earl Thomas. The corners were running deep with vertical routes instead of manning the flats. And, most vitally, this structure allowed the Seahawks to get an eighth man in the box, whereas the Tampa 2 called for a lighter run box and more creative tactics. With Bobby Wagner, K.J. Wright, and Kam Chancellor patrolling the underneath areas, quick passes rarely turned into big gains after the catch, and pass catchers took a lot of brutal hits. It was a sound scheme—but as other teams that decade discovered, it’s almost impossible to match that level of talent across the board. Even Seattle had issues maintaining the scheme as its best players aged.
The impact of “Seattle 3,” as Shanahan calls it, forced offenses to figure out a way to deal with the extra defender in the box. That led to the rise of the zone-read quarterback, where instead of using a blocker against that extra guy, the quarterback would just “read” him and decide whether to keep the ball or hand it off. Cam Newton proved that concept’s viability during his exceptional rookie season in 2011. Guys like Robert Griffin III, Russell Wilson, and Colin Kaepernick also showed the strategy could be successful as they led their teams to the playoffs in 2012. Teams eventually realized you didn’t need a run threat at quarterback to create a similar effect using run-pass options. Instead of pulling the ball and bolting when the unblocked defender attacks the running back, the quarterback throws it to a receiver on the outside, where the offense should have a numbers advantage.
The college-style option plays made the run game more effective against a loaded run box, and the rise of Shanahan and Sean McVay revitalized the play-action pass game. The convergence of those two ideas wreaked hell on NFL defenses at the end of the last decade and eventually broke the Seattle style of defense.
Finally, there was the rise of dual-threat quarterbacks, who are just as effective inside the pocket as they are outside of it. Patrick Mahomes’s MVP campaign in 2018 made us rethink our definition of elite quarterback play, and guys like Lamar Jackson and Josh Allen have followed his lead, presenting new challenges for defensive coordinators. That brings us to where we are today: The schemes Ryan and Spagnuolo deployed to slow down the 2007 Patriots—and the defense Johnson’s Eagles threw at the 2001 Rams—have inspired the top defenses in the NFL. Offenses have so many modes of play they can use to attack, and defensive coaches have had to find answers to deal with them all. While there are certainly defensive coordinators who prefer the bend-but-don’t-break style, guys like Spagnuolo, Brian Flores, Vic Fangio, and Mike Macdonald have found more creative ways to prevent explosive plays while still attacking the pocket.
The high-tech offenses and defenses we’re watching in today’s NFL have been shaped by the dominant teams that came before them. The game may be more sophisticated than ever, and the players have never been more talented, but in a discussion of greatness, influence has to be a factor. Does that mean the teams of the early 2000s could hang with the more modern champions on the field? Probably not, but without those early influencers and the success they enjoyed, the sport of football would look totally different today. The 2019 Chiefs wouldn’t have existed in the form they took without the foundation laid by the 2007 Patriots … and that juggernaut Pats offense may have never formed if not for the Greatest Show on Turf and the defensive tactics it inspired.
The great teams of today will push the sport forward in their own ways, but only time will tell which ones influence the next generation of champions. We may have to wait another 25 years before we can fully appreciate their contributions to the game. But for the older teams in the bracket, well, their legacies are already stamped.
