Since Bill Belichick began his reign of terror on the AFC East in 2001, it’s been a rough time to be a Jets, Dolphins, or Bills head coach.  It’s been a rough two decades for Buffalo — Marv Levy was the last Bills coach to win the division back in 1995 — but it hasn’t been much better for New York or Miami. Belichick has won 15 of the 17 division titles since 2001, with Herm Edwards leading the Jets to the division title way back in 2002.

The other man to do it was Tony Sparano, who passed away unexpectedly yesterday. In one of the great turnarounds in NFL history, taking the 1-15 Dolphins from the worst record in football to AFC East champions in one season.

But even Sparano left Miami with a losing record. In fact, since 2001, Dave Wannstedt (31-26) and Todd Bowles (2-1 as interim head coach) are the only Dolphins coaches with winning records. Adam Gase (16-16) is the next most successful Miami head coach since 2001, followed by Nick Saban (15-17), Tony Sparano (29-32), Joe Philbin (24-28), and Cam Cameron (1-15). Along with Bowles, Dan Campbell (5-7) and Jim Bates (3-4) spent time as interim coaches in Miami.

The Bills have had 9 head coaches since 2001: Sean McDermott (9-7) has the only winning record, followed by Rex Ryan (15-16), Doug Marrone (15-17), Mike Mularkey (14-18), Dick Jauron (24-33), Gregg Williams (17-31), and Chan Gailey (16-32); Perry Fewell (3-4) and Anthony Lynn (0-1) also spent time as interim head coaches.

Meanwhile, the Jets — who had six different head coaches from 1993 to 2001 — have been the second most stable AFC East team since 2001. New York has had only four head coaches, but none of them have had winning records: Herm Edwards (39-41) and Eric Mangini (23-25) were both two games under .500, Rex Ryan (46-50) had a winning record until his final season, and current head coach Todd Bowles (20-28) has the worst record of the bunch.

Over the last 17 years, Bill Belichick is 209-63, making him by far the most successful head coach of this era. When it comes to regular season success, Tony Dungy with the Colts (85-27) is the next most successful, and after that, there’s another long dropoff in quality.

I looked at every head coach since 2001, and added 40 games of .500 play to each coach’s record with each team. This helps smooth out sorting by raw winning percentage, which would otherwise be biased by coaches who had great records over short stints. The table below shows the most successful head coach for each team since 2001. Here’s how to ead it, using the Broncos as an example. Denver’s best coach since 2001 was John Fox, who went 46-18 as the team’s head coach. If you add 20 wins and 20 losses to Fox’s record, he would have an Adjusted Winning Percentage of 0.635, the third-best since 2001 behind Belichick and Dungy. His actual winning percentage was 0.719. Denver has had 5 head coaches since 2001, and the Broncos as a team have won 58.1% of their games since 2001.

Only the Browns, Texans, and Jets have failed to have a coach with a winning record since 2001. For Cleveland, there’s been no successful coach: Robiski gets listed here because of his short stint, so adding 40 games of .500 play makes him look good! Butch Davis (24-35) is probably the actual best coach of the Browns since ’01.

The Jets, Dolphins, and Bills are all in the bottom 10 since ’01 in terms of most successful coach, and Miami and Buffalo are two of the seven teams with six or more head coaches since 2001. So yeah, it’s been rough for the three AFC East teams not in Foxboro for the last 17 years.