Deadspin: This Has Been the Worst Season in NFL History

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- Half of the NFC playoff field could be led by Ryan Lindley, Mark Sanchez, and Derek Anderson.

- One of the two best teams in the NFC (Green Bay or Seattle) could conceivably still miss the playoffs in favor of an NFC South champ with a sub-.500 record.

- The most heartwarming story in all of football this season has been the unexpected good fortune of the Dallas fricking Cowboys. There is nothing uplifting about Jerry Jones being visibly happy. I fricking hate the Cowboys and I am only happy when they find themselves repeatedly humiliated on national television.

- Two of the league’s most exciting young passers (Kaep and RGIII) had their careers implode and may never recover.

- The league’s most celebrated rookie (Johnny Manziel) is fricking terrible.

- The league’s best running back missed virtually the entire season because he likes whipping his children in the scrotum with a tree branch.

- The entire first month of the season was upstaged by a video of a dude knocking his wife out in an elevator. (By the way, we are now at the stage of the Ray Rice scandal where most people have stopped giving a shite. Roger Goodell is never gonna admit that he saw the tape or knew what was on it and any time I read a new report about inconsistencies in his testimony, my eyes glaze over and I need an interpreter to explain the details.)

- The best thing that happened this season was a touchdown catch by a dude on a 5-9 team in a game that his team went on to lose.

-Bill Simmons bragged, “I’m probably in the 99.5 percentile for Most NFL Football Watched.”

- FOX brought in a UFC dude to announce a game. He noted that Norv Turner was thrilled to be working with Jim Caldwell. The two men work for separate teams.

- The Rams and the Raiders are probably playing their final season in their respective hometowns and haven’t had the courtesy to tell anyone yet.

- Tonight’s Titans/Jaguars game (both teams are 2-12) is emblematic of a Thursday night schedule that went out of its way to be optional viewing. The fact that Phil Simms (“And if you’re the Titans, you’re saying, Hey! My goodness!”) has been there for every last one of them makes the venture only more damnable.

- At one point, Sunday Night Football featured nine straight 20+-point blowouts. And the non-blowout games haven’t been much better.

-The best season ever by an individual defensive player has been wasted on a team that deliberately went into the season with Ryan Fitzpatrick as its QB, and then couldn’t even keep him healthy.

- The flags. The fricking flags. My God, the flags.

- The NFL’s powers-that-be are actually PLEASED with the statistical increase in penalty flags. Here was Roger Goodell climbing out of his fallout shelter in October to address the situation: "There was a good report on the state of the game, the pace of the game, the instant replay system that has I think improved, not only the consistency of calls, but also I think on the pace of the game." There is not a creature on Earth that believes an increase of stoppages in play somehow makes for a better-paced sporting event.

- The league’s commissioner has essentially become a burden upon the entire league the way Dan Snyder is a burden to his own team. Goodell is like a terrible owner, only he owns everything and will never be ousted. He could shoot a dolphin on live television and Bob Kraft would be like, "That man has integrity."

And the worst part is that, at the end of this, the fricking Patriots are gonna win another championship. They’re clearly the best team. It’s horrible. A decent batch of playoff games could redeem this whole enterprise, but no … no, a bunch of ungrateful Boston fans are gonna celebrate yet another title. And they’ll still probably complain about the fricking Helmet Catch anyway.

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