The 1981 New England Patriots: The NFL's Most DISAPPOINTING Teams

There are a lot of ways to define an NFL team as disappointing. But in order to attain that specific label, there must have been some positive expectations coming into the season. We define those expectations as consecutive seasons with a positive C-Score wherein the second season was higher than the first and with a score of at least 15. We ask for two seasons to minimize or even eliminate any notion that the team is a fluke. This indicates that a team is ready to make the leap into serious Super Bowl contention or that they are already there and have no intentions of losing that status. The disappointment comes in season three, where the team instead descends into negative C-Score territory. The further teams fall from season two to season three, the bigger their disappointment.

The New England Patriots of the late 1970s weren't what the New England Patriots are thought of today, but they were winning and competing. They couldn't quite break through though, and the stench of their early 1970s run always lingered. The 80s weren't too bad a time for them either, but that wasn't the case with this 1981 squad. What happened to them?

Explanation of C-Score:

C-Score is a metric created by this channel to assign an overall value to a football team. It takes a team's:

-Results, including standard and Pythagorean W-L record
-Performance, including game control and play-by-play production
-Quality of opponents, specifically performance level against opponents

and distills all of that into one cumulative and comparative score reflecting the context of the season in question. When applicable, a team's playoff performance is also included.

A C-Score of 0 represents an average football team, whereas anything above 0 represents an above average team and anything below 0 represents a below average team.

A team's record is important, but not always indicative of C-Score. An 11-5 team can rate higher than a 13-3 team or lower than a 9-7 team. Not all records are created equally.

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