The Top 12 Worst Games of 2021: An Introduction

Personal Vowels proudly presents the first installment of Retrospective Writings, a look back at football past.

WE know what the good games from last season are. Baltimore-Kansas City in week 2 was an instant classic, as was LAC-KC in Week 15, KC-CIN in Week 17, and, arguably, KC-CLE in Week 1. If you can keep pace with the Chiefs, you usually get a pretty good game. And that should come as no surprise: excluding the once-in-a-decade teams that are so dominantly unstoppable that they are boringly good (think the 1991 Washington team, 2007 New England Patriots or 2013 Broncos), good teams with good offenses tend to make for good television and good viewing experiences. The Bengals, who beat the Chiefs and went to the Super Bowl, were also mostly a good team, and they played fun, interesting games for the most part: a thrilling overtime victory over the Vikings in Week 1, an equally exciting if low-budget action flick against Jacksonville in Week 4, a disappointing but nail-biting overtime loss against their Super Bowl almost-opponents, the San Francisco 49ers, in Week 14. These teams were good in a way that made them exciting – they were high-powered enough on offense to make their games enjoyable, but they had enough flaws that they played a lot of close games. That tends to make for a more interesting viewership experience than outright dominance; even though it may have been exciting to watch Cincinnati mash their black-and-purple division rivals in Baltimore to a corvine-colored pulp twice, sweeping the Ravens for the first time since the 2015-16 season, the Bengals’ dual beatdowns in which they stacked exactly 41 points on an outmatched John Harbaugh squad don’t really qualify as “great” games in our book. We’d call them “good,” if anything. But these weren’t “bad” games. Nor were games where the Chiefs slaughtered their opposition with pitiless pigskin precision. It was relatively entertaining to see the Chiefs annihilate the Las Vegas Raiders twice in much the same way that Cincinnati annihilated the Ravens, dumping a disgusting 41 and 48 points on the tempest-tossed Gruden orphans to concoct an intriguingly easy sweep of an overwhelmed opponent (Raiders fans will naturally disagree). These were displays of destructive offensive power, and this is fun stuff to watch when you have exciting, daring, swaggering playmakers like Patrick Mahomes and Joe Burrow – they can win convincingly, but when they do, they’re fun.

                  Games can be exciting in more ways than just these, though. Thankfully for us Average Football Enjoyers, there is almost always some kind of redeeming aspect to the typical NFL game, whether it’s exhilaratingly exciting offense, pleasingly stifling defense, or some combination of these elements. The hallmark of quality competitive sports, after all, is that one doesn’t know what will happen, but can anticipate compelling developments during the game.

            This list is not about games like that.

            No, no, no. This list aspires to analyze the bottom of the barrel waste, the most unappetizing chaff, the most hard-to-watch garbage that the NFL could throw at us in 2021. It won’t be pretty. It won’t be inspiring. It won’t be uplifting or optimistic. But much like Joe Burrow and Patrick Mahomes, they’ll be fun to reminisce about. These are the Twelve Worst Games of 2021. Roll the tape.

The List

The criteria for this list will be, as with all lists written by Personal Vowels, intensely subjective, formidably unscientific, and in more than a couple places, outright beguiling. That’s how we do things here. We are gridiron nihilists, and the only object sought by we PV acolytes is compelling narrative that can be at least somewhat substantiated by fact and statistic. We think we were able to do that here.

That said, we should offer some helpful disclaimers first. We have not included a few games that you may expect to see here – namely, a few games involving one Buffalo Bills. Their Week 13 trench warfare reenactment with New England where Mac Jones threw three passes and their now notorious tilt with Jacksonville in Week 9 have not been included, because, well, come on – those games were unique enough that they do not deserve to appear here. We have enough 48-45 games in our lives. We can stand for a random 9-6 upset or bonesnapping 14-10 divisional deathmatch every now and then. And we’re sure there are a couple contests sprinkled throughout the NFL’s marathon season that meet all possible criteria for badness that we’ve excluded. Please forgive us if your favorite worst game failed to live up to the exacting standards of sloppiness to which we subscribe.

The table of wretched contents lurks below, and as you will no doubt see once you’ve perused the rankings, you should prepare for football nausea and athletic miasma. We can’t promise you’ll agree with all our entries, but we can promise this: we have PhDs in watching & recognizing bad football. We’ve put those tools to use here. Read on if you durst.

The Disastrous Dozen

Dishonorable Mention: Giants at Dolphins, Week 13

XII. Giants at Bears, Week 17

XI. Packers at Chiefs, Week 9

X. Raiders at Browns, Week 15

IX. Dolphins at Saints, Week 16

VIII. Football Team at Broncos, Week 8

VII. Browns at Vikings, Week 4

VI. Jets at Texans, Week 12

V. Lions at Browns, Week 11

IV. Vikings at Bears, Week 15

III. Saints at Seahawks, Week 7

II. Jaguars at Jets, Week 16

I. Lions at Steelers, Week 10