I'm letting the turkey digest a bit and watching the Dallas game, and I remembered how awful the NFC East division was last year. That made me think that the NFC South is just plain bad on a ridiculous scale, where we'll be LUCKY if the division winner can get to 8-8. It's still mathematically possible for the division winner to go to the playoffs with a 5-11 record.
But remember before that. It wasn't too long ago that the AFC West was just as comical, with two stinky bad teams in KC and Oakland being horrifically bad year after year from 2007-2009. A bad KC team won the division at 10-6 in 2010, and in 2011 it was a collection of 8-8 and 7-9 teams dry humping each other for the right to go to the playoffs. Now all of a sudden they're a pretty tough division, with their 3rd place team still very alive for contention in the playoffs, just like last year.
The NFC West is the same way, but it was only in 2010 when 7-9 Seattle had won the division. Before that, people bitched and complained constantly about how terrible and noncompetitive the NFC West was as a division. ****, if it weren't for the NFC West gifting the Chiefs a few wins each time we matched up with them, we wouldn't have even made the playoffs in 2006 and 2010.
And with most people acknowledging that the NFC West and the AFC West are among the toughest divisions in football (I don't think there's a person that wouldn't say they're both in the top 3), I just wonder if the same isn't in store for the NFC South.
Is there something about playing in a horrific non-competitive division one year and then seeing meteoric rises out of most of its teams shortly thereafter? Is it the fact that all teams are bad at once and tend to grow together at the same time? Is it that the right coaches and people come in at the same time? Or is it that it's rare to have teams completely devoid of any good players, and most of the time the changes that need to be made are just very slight yet crucial ones?
For the NFC South, I don't know where we might see that taking place. In the case of Carolina and Atlanta, it's kind of obvious to me that those teams really ****ing hate their coaches, and a simple change to somebody who doesn't suck dick might mean everything to bringing them back, even with Atlanta being diseased with Piolebola. No clue why New Orleans can't find their asses from a hole in the ground. Their defense is bad, but it's always been kind of shitty. One has to think they'll find a way to bring it back for the last years of Brees. And Tampa... dunno... there's always hope?