Over the last three and a half seasons, the Giants have the worst record in football. In fact, it’s not particularly close: since the start of the 2017 season, the Giants are 13-42. The Jets have the second worst mark, at 16-39, the Bengals are 16-38-1, and every other team has a winning percentage at least 10% higher than the Giants.

But does it feel like the Giants have been by far the worst team in the NFL? Probably not: they’ve been bad, but not even necessarily all that noticeably bad. And I think the biggest reason for that is New York has been relatively competitive over this stretch. The Giants don’t even rank in the bottom three in points differential since the start of the 2017 season: the Jets, Raiders, and Dolphins all have fared worse. Along with Tampa Bay (more on them in a moment), the Giants have been a large outlier in terms of underperforming, at least when we measure their points scored and points allowed numbers relative to their winning percentage.

We can calculate each team’s Pythagenpat winning percentage fairly easily. If you want the fine print, check this footnote ^[1]To use the 2020 Giants as an example. First, you calculate the total points scored and points allowed in all Giants games (296) and divide it by the number of games played (7, leaving 42.3 total … Continue reading, but the Pythagenpat winning percentage tells you what you would “expect” a team’s record to be based on how many points they score and how many points they allowed. The 2020 Giants have a Pythagenpat winning percentage of 0.287, which would translate to a 2-5 record instead of the team’s actual 1-6 record. In fact, over the last three and a half years, New York has had a better Pythagenpat winning percentage each year:

In 2018, New York went 4-8 in games decided by 7 or fewer points, and since the start of ’17, New York is just 8-21 in these one-score games. Tampa Bay is 10-20 in these close games and 12-13 in all other games.

The Giants form an easy comparison to the other team in New York. While the Jets have a better record than the Giants, they have a 7-28 mark in non-close games, similar to the Giants 5-21 record (but over more games). Meanwhile, in close games, the Giants are 8-21 while the Jets are 9-11. Had those numbers been closer to average for the Giants, it’s likely that the Jets would have the worst record over the last three and a half seasons.

The table below shows each team’s Pythagenpat winning percentage since the start of 2017. To read the Giants line, they have played 55 games and have a 0.236 winning percentage. The Giants have scored 1078 points and allowed 1425, for a points differential of -347. The team has a Pythagenpat winning percentage of 0.326, which means they have underachieved by about 9%.

Finally, here’s every team-season since 2017. This includes the partial year of 2020, which is more prone to outliers of course. The 2020 Falcons have been the biggest underachiever by this metric, while the 2020 Browns have been the biggest overachievers.

Please leave your thoughts in the comments.