Which Franchise is most absolutely fucked up with no hope of recovery?

oakland wins in a walk imo...except for the fact that davis is really old.

maybe gonna go detroit, tho they did just cut out the cancer

st. louis imo

that team makes absolutely no sense at all

raiders have a good young nucleus, if they could ever get their coaching situation straight i'd say that they have the best chance out of all of these teams of permanently crawling out of their hole

Tough call, but no one brings the crushing despair like Detroit.

3. roster has fallen to pieces, organization can recover (Bengals, Rams)
2. organization stifled by bad ownership, will eventually recover (Raiders, Lions)
1. organization defined by it's enduring, suffocating mediocrity, never had a chance from start (Cardinals)

it's the cardinals or the lions, guys. the other three teams have nowhere near the same record of unflinching failure and defeat and destroying perfectly good players etc etc, nowhere close. one day they will be back to mediocrity or even goodness but the lions and the cards are genuinely cursed teams that should be disbanded immediately and the owners sent to prison.

cardinals have hope and don't outright suck now, they're just mediocre. the lions have 14 former first round pick wide receivers so if they get a good qb they'll be amazing~

i think the rams are a good choice, they've been getting a little worse each year since the pats sonned them in the super bowl. they're tied down to a huge contract with a qb who kinda blows, their rb is a little iffy imo, and their receivers are getting old.

here is the final paragraph of what i wrote about the rams for ade's blog

The Rams, in the near future, have no hope. They are a team with a bad, young defense and a capable, but aging, offense. They'll be lucky to pull off three wins this year, and even luckier if they can manage to click on both offense and defense in the same game. Linehan's such a lame duck that he's basically foie gras, and whoever is coaching by the 2009 off-season will have to rebuild a team that's a mess in a way that a plane crash is a mess. This once well-oiled machine is now just a heap of smoking rubble, but you can't even really blame the pilot.

seriously this team is really fucked for a while

the cardinals' hopes are false -- they will find a way to ruin it, trust me.

Agreed on St. Louis; they'd need to blow it up and start over.

i get no joy out of the cardinals misfortunes as a team tbh, though i do get extreme joy out of leinart's career misfortunes.

It's funny how a "record of unflinching failure and defeat and destroying perfectly good players" can be reversed when shitheads are booted from the front office & coaching staff (cf. Tampa Bay Buccaneers).

Which is to say that claiming the Cardinals will fail simply because they're the Cardinals is garbage.

Besides, About.com has them going 10-6 this year & finishing first, and who here among us would dare bet against About.com?

sports teams can have an ingrained culture of failure that is harder to shift than skunk smell, so i'd argue that that isn't garbage at all. i can think of plenty of non-US examples, but here the Cards are the poster team for that phenomenon.

"1. organization defined by it's enduring, suffocating mediocrity, never had a chance from start (Cardinals)"

This applies to cincy as well. Both the Cards and the Bengals have cheap-ass ownership. I've also heard that the Bengals facilities are the worst in the league. Cardinals seem to actually be trying. The Bengals just have a corporate culture of suck.

david, if you want to try to fire the cardinals' ownership, which is the problem there, you be my guest trying. call the commish!

i mean it's the exact same problems the raiders have except that A) al davis once was at least sane enough to hire madden B) he is very old and not an entire family of forrest gumps.

Wow this question has led to my deepest thinking of the day.

such a good question!

a welcome distraction from our modern societal problems

guys what if bill bidwell and al davis were running for president

david, if you want to try to fire the cardinals' ownership, which is the problem there, you be my guest trying. call the commish!

Well, yeah, there's that wee little roadblock, too, but if the Red Sox can overcome their d-bag racist dipshit ownership group (thanks for dying, Mr. Yawkey!), then any sports franchise can. If their owners die or are killed, that is.

Did Tampa Bay switch owners prior to their run of success, or did their owners suddenly wise up or luck out wrt personnel decisions?

well, i don't know the answer to that cos lol bucs but their ownership did only have 20 years of complete fail to get themselves out of, versus 50

Hey, they won ten games as recently as 1976, so you just watch it!

I am very curious about what will happen when Al Davis kicks it.

I voted Raiders because I still smile thinking about that old NFLN "four months ago" ad where they got the raiders fans grilling and dude #1 is like "raiders baby! 4-0 in the preseason!" and dude #2 just says "raiders" like he's all gangsta and then the grill catches on fire.

haha they won ten games the year the bucs came into the league. COINCIDENCE?

btw al davis is never going to die so my whole point upthread about how he is just one man and not a family of morans is just...going nowhere.

Oakland is screwy probably more now than usual, but they did go to a Superbowl this decade and were pretty good for a few years in a row. Al Davis may not be a good owner now, but at one time the dude knew what he was doing, they were pretty dominant club from the AFL merger through the early mid 80s with a long string of Hall of Fame players. Al is also the only owner living that was also a head football coach.

Looking in the long road, I'd go with the Cardinals. The Lions have been pretty much suck outside of a few years with Wayne Fontes and Barry Sanders, but they have something that Arizona doesn't being a real history (same division as the Pack, Vikings and Bears) and a good fan base that does care. Maybe there are die hard Arizona Cardinal fans, but there cannot be that many. Combine that with a terrible history and ownership, I don't see the Cards ever going much further than 9-7 in their best years playing in a weak ass division. The Cardinal ownership are the guys that just sit back and get rich off of a losing team.

The Lions could win, they just need to be like the Colts where the owner realizes he doesn't know jack about football so he brings in someone good to put together the club. The Colts under Bob Irsay were a joke, but when the son took over, he did the smartest thing he could do, he brought in a solid football guy in Bill Polian and that changed everything.

That being said, the Rams look pretty horrible. I don't know how much St. Louis given up on their club, but they seemed thrilled to have a team that was good a few years back.

The Bengals just doesn't quite jive. They have been pretty terrible for a long time and seem to still have some talent, but things have not gone right. I don't know, as bad as Cinci is and has been, I just cannot put it worse than the Cardinals. They do have a couple of Superbowl appearances, criminy the Cardinals haven't won jack since they were in Chicago.

I voted Raiders because I still smile thinking about that old NFLN "four months ago" ad where they got the raiders fans grilling and dude #1 is like "raiders baby! 4-0 in the preseason!" and dude #2 just says "raiders" like he's all gangsta and then the grill catches on fire.

― El Tomboto, Friday, September 26, 2008 4:24 PM (26 minutes ago) Bookmark

lololol yes, that commercial was a perfect portrait of raiders fans btw, all mexican dudes wearin faded lyle alzado jerseys

btw the chiefs deserve to be on the list

Obama is temporarily dropping out of the presidential race to fix the Lions.

that would be a good onion story

YES WE CAN go 9 and 7.

i'm really thinkin this comes down to the niners, bengals, rams, lions and cardinals, cuz imo it's a question of which team has the worst ownership situation. hell, throw in the saints and the bears too.

a guy like mike brown, owner of the bengals, completely chokes away the best efforts by his football people to field a competetive team by screwing with football operations and fucking them when it comes to hugely important shit like scouting - they have the smallest, cheapest scouting staff in the league, and it's been that way for years. tom benson, owner of the saints, is an incredible shitbag who's spent decades looking for new and inventive ways to cornhole the new orleans fanbase, all while contributing ZERO to the community. the bidwills need no introduction. i'm not sure about the rams, bcz i have no idea where they'll even be in a few years. the yorks are dipshits. etc. etc.

Raiders. Rams are not that far removed from success and this is more due to the cyclical nature of the current NFL. They will be back.

Cardinals seem to (finally) be on the right track, Lions finally did the smart thing and fired Millen, and the Bengals, well...they were a close second.

Al Davis has to die before Oakland gets any better.

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

Oh, good timing.

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

as usual, none of these teams won.

btw the chiefs deserve to be on the list

― cankles, Friday, September 26, 2008 3:55 PM Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

lololol yes, that commercial was a perfect portrait of raiders fans btw, all mexican dudes wearin faded lyle alzado jerseys

did u know that lyle alzado was a jew? true story.

RUNOFF RUNOFF!!!1!