The 2023 Patriots are particularly lopsided among bad teams.

Teams who select in the top three are often abhorrent in each of the three game rounds. Not the Patriots of 2023.

Right after the loss to the New York Giants that all but ensured any remaining Thanksgiving leftovers in the fridge would be casualties of Patriots Nation eating our feelings, Adrian Phillips let a quote rip that wouldn’t be out of place for us after one of our high school games.

“We gave up 10 points, and lost the game two weeks in a row,” he told the Boston Herald after Sunday’s 10-7 loss to the Giants. “So now, we’ve got to give up zero; whatever we can to get our offense the ball back and get a chance to win. If 10 ain’t enough, then we got to bat 1.000, and give up zero.”

And instead of how a fanbase watching a functional football team works, where a line like that would result in “…..who exactly TF do you think you are??”, our collective reaction was, “Yeah, I mean, hey, when you’re right, you’re right”.

The Carolina Panthers may have a worse record, but the 2023 New England Patriots are somehow even worse at a pretty important part of football: scoring points.

New England’s offense ranks dead last in offensive points per game, at 14.6. The Panthers, Giants, and this week’s opponent, the New York Jets, are 31st, 30th, and 29th in the NFL with 14.8, 14.9, and a whopping 15.7 offensive points per game, respectively.

And as a result, the Pats are currently locked into a top-5 pick in the 2024 draft, with a chance to get as high as the second overall pick if they catch a few breaks this weekend. So, if you believe the old Parcells-ism that you are what your record says you are, the Patriots will finish the season as the second, third, or fourth/fifth-worst team in football this year.

But you already knew all that. You know that scoring a lone touchdown this year has getting-lucky-at-the-bar odds. You know that we’ve gotten enough Bill Belichick “FML” faces and gifs and clips to last a lifetime, and that’s just counting his meme-able moments during the Cowboys game. And you know the defense has been balling at such a high level that Adrian Phillips wasn’t even exaggerating when he said the defense frequently holds the opposing offense to such a low point total, it looks like the football we watched in the 3-yards-and-a-cloud-of-dust era. He was just stating how it started, and how it’s going.

That anomaly — having a defense that’s objectively one of the NFL’s best by almost any metric while the offense can’t find their own ass with both hands and a lighter — is what’s interesting, in a “How did you get the beans above the frank?!” sort of way.

Anecdotally, if you think back to the teams that are getting a top-5 pick in the draft as a result of their nightmarish performance, they’re the kind of team you normally think of as “start all your fantasy players if you see _______ on the schedule”. They can’t do anything right. They let up 30+ points a game and typically feature a quarterback who couldn’t hit water throwing out of a boat. Technically speaking, they could screw up toast.

So, I wanted to compare the 2023 Patriots to some of those teams that are truly an insult to the sport of football itself that typically ended up picking in the top-3 of the draft, and see if there are any recent examples of a team who was this bipolar — as opposed to being comically bad at basically everything.

To do that, we turn to our favorite nerd metric – Football Outsiders er, sorry, FTN Fantasy’s DVOA, which, if you’re not familiar, is an acronym that stands for Defense-Adjusted Value Over Average. In terms for those of us who passed Stats in college with a D+, it measures how good or bad a team’s down-to-down performance is compared to the league average, and it also takes into account the in-game situation and quality of opponent. The stat’s available for both offense and defense, so, with all due respect to special teams, the following is comparing how really, really bad teams from years past stack up to the ‘23 Pats.

We’ll throw in a few anecdotes about the teams we’re discussing below too, partially to Remember Some Guys, and mostly to remind us all of those dumpster-fire teams that the New England Patriots are suddenly in the same company as.

Going in reverse chronological order: we begin with last season, and the crème de la……uh, whatever the opposite of crème de la crème is. We’ll be referring to the worst team in the league that year as first in the draft, even if they didn’t end up picking first (if they traded or otherwise lost the pick), the second-worst team as second, and so on.

(also FYI: FTN’s DVOA only goes back to 2020, so, that’s as far as we can go here)

(also also FYI: each year’s draft is based on the previous season’s result, meaning 2023 represents the 2022 season, and so on)

2023 NFL Draft

1. Chicago Bears: Offensive DVOA: 24th | Defensive DVOA: 32nd

2. Houston Texans: Offensive DVOA: 31st | Defensive DVOA: 28th

3. Arizona Cardinals: Offensive DVOA: 27th | Defensive DVOA: 26th

I know it seems like we’re constantly on fast forward these days, but last season wasn’t that long ago. Kliff Kingsbury and Lovie Smith both got fired, Kyler Murray tore his ACL after signing a $230 million contract extension after famously getting roasted by his own team for playing too many video games, and meanwhile Da Bears hired Matt Eberflus, couldn’t stop a nosebleed on defense, and locked up the first pick with a 3-14 record, which they’d trade to Carolina for… well, you know how that’s gone.

2022 NFL Draft

1. Jacksonville Jaguars: Offensive DVOA: 28th | Defensive DVOA: 30th

2. Detroit Lions: Offensive DVOA: 29th | Defensive DVOA: 29th

3. Houston Texans: Offensive DVOA: 30th | Defensive DVOA: 24th

Before the Lions were everyone whose team doesn’t have a playoff shot’s favorite team, they were what you though they were — the team that hadn’t won a playoff game since Nirvana released Nevermind, which is now playing on classic