2017 NFL Preseason Thread: Ki-Jana Carter edition

I've always liked the Chargers. First with Dan Fouts and that ridiculous offense and later with an inexplicable 11-win playoff team with Stan Humphries in the early '90s. Now, though, with Rivers and the move to L.A., the Chargers seem to be the NFL team no one is rooting for.

 

The Bills are finally going to acknowledge that Cookie Gilchrist was a great player.

Cookie Gilchrist selected to Bills' Wall of Fame

 

Speaking of the Bills, they are going to suck this year.

 

This post could've been made in any late August of this century.

 

Well, they've been consistently almost mediocre for a while now. But Taylor is injured, Watkins is gone, McCoy is at that age for RBs ...

I'm thinking 3 wins might be the ceiling.

 

Yet still not bad enough for last place in the division.

 

If there were ever a season where an NFL team did some NBA-style player sitting, it would be the Patriots this year. They should roll Brady out about midseason. Let Garoppolo handle the Jets and Bills.

 

Yeah. The Patriots' conference schedule will be an extension of the preseason.

 

He did that last year - the Jacoby Brisket game against the Bills - me and my friends were in Vegas and we each had $100 on a three game parlay - $800 total to pay $5,600. The other two games hit, and the Patriots mailed it in from the kickoff.

Not bitter or anything though.

 

Belichick didn't do that, Goodell did. That was the last game of Brady's four-game suspension. Incidentally, it was also one of the four times the Bills have beaten New England in this century.

 

Garapolo was going to start until about 5 minutes after we placed the bet. Brisket had a thumb injury and could not play. Well, he played, but he was horrendous.

And yes, I know his last name.

He's Brisket to me.

 

It blows my mind that while the Patriots have been so good at everything for the past 16 years, the entire AFC East has been equally incompetent. Other than the Sanchez/Ryan years in the late 2000s, and the very last gasps of the Dolphins' glory years in the early 2000s, none of the teams in the division have had any sort of success that lasted beyond one season.
Has there ever been anything like that in NFL history? Closest I can think of was the 49ers controlling the NFC West in the 1980s and 90s, but even they had to deal with some pretty good Rams and Saints teams at various points.
The Patriots have had 15 10-win seasons since 2001 and the rest of the AFC East combined has had eight (and two of those eight were in the 2001 season). The Jets had five of those, but none were in consecutive years. From 2011-15, no AFC East team other than the Patriots won 10 games in a season.
By comparison, the 49ers had 17 10-win seasons from 1981-98 (the one miss was the 1982 strike season) and the rest of the NFC West had 11 in the same span.
That kind of collective incompetence is stunning.