Are the Redskins the Most Entertaining Team in the League?

[Goaldeje]

This guy think so...

I've been on both sides of the entertainment coin as a football fan. I came of age in New York City in the mid-'90s, which meant that I got to see two games on Sundays. One was the post-Parcells Giants, which meant Rodney Hampton running into the line for two and a half yards between incompletions by Dave Brown or Kent Graham. The other game featured the pre-Parcells Jets, who helped establish Gang Green's reputation for ineptitude while chasing it with total irrelevance. Since those games each required a TV blackout on the other channel and I was too young to stay up for the night games, those two awful teams were all I got each week. It's no wonder I grew up to be a cranky football writer.

These days, life is better. I have Sunday Ticket, and the NFL Network, and Game Rewind. I can see any team that I want, and if I do decide to watch the Giants, they have a successful passing game whose curiosity extends beyond throwing a short pass somewhere in the vicinity of Chris Calloway. And Simmons usually lets me stay up late to watch the night games if my article for the morning is done. Football is exciting!

If you've seen this year's slate of Thursday-night games1 you know that not every team is exciting. I watch just about every play of every game during the course of a full week, and there's a definite hierarchy of teams in terms of pure excitement. When I watch some teams play, I'm glued to the screen; for others, I praise the heavens above that it's socially acceptable to check my e-mail once every 30 seconds. I read a lot of power rankings articles every week that attempt to rank teams in order of how good they are, but nobody ever puts together power rankings on how entertaining teams are to watch.

That changes now. And there's one simple rule: Against an average opponent, which team would I want to watch the most? Would I rather watch this team play that average opponent than that team? And so on and so on. Being good helps, obviously, but an entertaining bad team (like last year's Panthers) are going to be more fun to watch than a boring good team (like last year's Steelers). You get the idea. I tend to prefer teams that throw the ball and make a lot of big plays on defense, so my bias leans there. Let's start with the worst of the worst:

http://www.grantland.com/story/_/id/8553749/ranking-nfl-teams-watchability

 

[Henry]

That's fun.

Between his bit on the Eagles and then on Griffin I was rolling.

 

[Goaldeje]

Yeah, pretty funny. This was my favorite:

Raiders-Jaguars, not coincidentally, was one of just two 4 p.m. games on the schedule last Sunday. That means that every sports bar in America with more than three or four televisions had this game on. Imagine the requests that bartenders must have gotten to turn off that game. "Figure skating!" "Infomercials!" "The sweet sound of silence!" During the first quarter of the Patriots-Jets game, I was turning to this game periodically to get an idea of what was going on. By the third quarter, when the Patriots-Jets game was in commercials, I was going outside for smoke breaks. I don't smoke.

 

[Bulldog]

speaking of which, how did the NFL in the offseason decided that Bucs-Vikings would be a great marquee game for Thursday night?

looks like a 1pm Sunday regional game to me even with the Vikings starting at 5-2, although I agree now that Minny got a bit ahead of itself in the first half and is going to come back to the pack.

you don't improve from 3-13 that fast.

 

[Bulldog]

Griffin is the most exciting player in the NFL.

I don't know about the rest of the team. I think right now a number of them are along for the ride.

 

[Burgundy Burner]

It's all about our QB and here in Eagles territory, the fans find it hard not to like Griffin and the excitement that he brings to the game. I really think that fans across the league really look forward to the weekly highlights. That 4th and 10 play is one that simply defies the odds. RG3 made JPP look so silly on that play.

 

[China]

Someone's been reading Serv's thread and has come to realize RGIII makes every game he's in highly entertaining.