Other Winless Teams
Five previous teams finished with a winless and tieless season record, mostly during World War II: the 1934 Cincinnati Reds at 0–8, the 1942 Detroit Lions at 0–11, the 1943 Chicago Cardinals at 0–10, and the 1944 Brooklyn Tigers and Chicago Cardinals/Pittsburgh Steelers at 0–10 (the Cardinals and Steelers merged for the 1944 season and are commonly referred to as Card-Pitt, or, derisively, as the “carpet”).
The 0–14 record was matched by the 1980 New Orleans Saints, who won their penultimate game to end the season 1–15. The 1981 Baltimore Colts then won their opener and closer, but lost every game in between to equal the Buccaneers’ and Saints’ 14-game single-season losing streak. The 1982 Colts were winless in a strike-shortened season, but did get a tie in one game. The 1990 New England Patriots had a 1–1 record when several of the players sexually harassed a female reporter. The fallout from the scandal contributed to the team finishing 0–14 in its remaining games.
The record was surpassed by the 2001 Carolina Panthers, who lost their last fifteen games to eclipse the Buccaneers’ record for consecutive games lost in a single season, and the 2008 Detroit Lions, the only winless team in the era of 16-game schedules. Ten NFL teams since the 1976 Buccaneers have lost 15 or 16 games in a season, but the Buccaneers’ 26-game losing streak from 1976 to 1977 still stands as the longest in modern NFL history.
Read more about this topic: 1976 Tampa Bay Buccaneers Season
Famous quotes containing the word teams:
“A sturdy lad from New Hampshire or Vermont who in turn tries all the professions, who teams it, farms it, peddles, keeps a school, preaches, edits a newspaper, goes to Congress, buys a township, and so forth, in successive years, and always like a cat falls on his feet, is worth a hundred of these city dolls. He walks abreast with his days and feels no shame in not “studying a profession,” for he does not postpone his life, but lives already.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)