bob costas made a huge point, the 72 dolphins in their whole season never played a team better than 8-6 and went 3-0 in the playoffs against 3 playoff teams so to speak, the patriots are playing more games and are 8 or 9-0 against playoff teams this season including the playoffs... if the patriots win they will be the best team in history, it pains me to type this but i hate the giants more than i hate the pats, believe it or not.
I don't know if they will go down as the greatest ever. Yeah the 72 'phags had their faults but so do the 07 Pats. The Pats are winning games because they have a terrific offense but their D is suspect especially in the passing game. I think an Aikman in his prime throwing to Irvin, Novacek and Alvin Harper along with that unreal OL would certainly be a matchup. That OL is/was better than this Pats one and they needed cocaine not holds to win games.
The '72 dolphins aren't considered the greatest team ever so NE '07 isn't competing w/ them for that title, they are competing w/ them to become the 2nd undefeated team in the SB era.
Right, aren't there numerous Cowboys teams, as well as the 85 Bears, considered better than the Dolphins?
I wasn't alive back then but all I have read and seen most people feel the '73 Dolphins were better than the '72 dolphins even though they had 2 losses. The '72 team only beat 2 teams over .500 in the reg season and zero playoff bound teams then went out and won their 3 playoff games by an average of 6 points a game. The '73 team won their 3 playoff games by an average of 17 points a game. In my lifetime the teams I think are the best are the '85 Bears, '84 and '89 Niners and '78 Steelers(although I was too young to swee them play).
The only people who think the 72 Dolphins were the best ever (or even the best in the past 40 years) are Dolphins fans and players, and people who pay too much attention to fluke things like going 16-0 versus 15-1. This is the same argument as the one made by fans of college teams that play in weak conferences and go undefeated - the fact is, the teams deserve all the credit in the world for doing all that could have been asked of them, but that doesn't mean that they're the best team in the country. The problems with these historical comparisons is that (1) they are of course purely speculative, and (2) the game and the players have changed so much over the years that objective comparison is almost impossible. Just from the size and speed of the players it is clear that a very good 2008 team could (and probably would) beat an excellent 1970s team, and an excellent 2008 team could beat a great 1970s one. The only way to make these comparisons to look at how a team fared against its own competition at the time. By any objective measure of that type, the 72 Dolphins aren't close to the best team ever, with the 85 Bears and several teams among the 70s Cowboys, 70s Steelers, and 80s 49ers much better. I personally think that the 85 Bears were the most dominant team I've ever seen.
The top 20 teams of the Super Bowl era as voted by a panel of so-called experts- http://forums.theganggreen.com/showpost.php?p=753249&postcount=4 My top three- 1985 Bears 1975 Steelers 1984 49ers My top 5 from the pre-Super Bowl era (in chronological order)- 1941 Bears 1949 Eagles 1950 Browns 1962 Packers 1963 Bears
Two words: Backup quarterback. The 72 Dolphins won most of their games with Griese on the IR. Matt Cassel has done nothing but throw a pic that went for a touchdown. Winning all those games, with a backup qb and not cheating, pretty impressive.
Lets see, In 1972 Miami was only in the league 6 years. In 1972 Miami was in their 2nd of three SB's in a row. In 1972 Miami had to play a playoff game on the road against the Pittsburgh Steelers and had no bye week. In 1972 Miami lost starting QB and future HOF'er Bob Griese and he missed 9 games. In 1972 Miami finished the 72 season with the number 1 offense and the number 1 defense. In 1972 Miami had two RB's with more then a 1000 yards rushing and another RB with over 500 yards rushing. Miami was basically one dimensional on offense, yet they couldn't be stopped. Say what you like about the Dolphins of 72, but they didn't have an easy run in 72, they had to overcome a lot to win it all. The only thing the Pats have had to overcome is the grind of winning all their games. The Pats have been 99% healthy the entire year. No one is allowed to lay a finger on Brady or any of the WR's, the head slap was still part of football in 72. Football was much tougher in 72 then it is today based on the abuse players take from week to week. Miami had win as a team, not an offense like the Pats, cause their Defense couldn't hold the 72 jock straps.
But he still had ability and was a proven player, it wasn't like Kyle Mackey came in for Miami and they still went undefeated.
Some of the issue with these comparisons is just semantics i.e Is this the best single season ever vs. Is this the best single team ever? I've those two questions thrown around quite a bit, sometimes interchangeably but they're two very different questions. The other problem when talking about the "greatest team ever" is the difference in eras. The best example I can think of would be say the '07 Pats against the '85 Bears. Those Bears were absolutely dominant against their competition, however the '07 Patriots would be playing with a much better idea of how to tear apart a 46 defense than any of the teams those Bears played. While those Bears looked far more dominant against there opponents if Tom Brady played him with todays rules with the knowledge of how to beat a 46 that nobody had figured out back in 85 and played a 4 reciever spread I think the Bears would get shit on.To make things even more unclear we have the differences in rules between the two eras such as the illegal contact past 5 yards that exists now vs. being able maul a receiver anywhere downfield. Best Single Season Ever? I think that has to go to the '07 Pats if they win in a week just because of the level of competition that exists in the NFL today and for the other reasons mentioned by rogerblaze. Best Team Ever? That gets into a much more ambiguous area. Edit: statjeff beat me to it.
That's all fine and dandy that you think the odds are sooner or later some so-so team will stumble and fumble its way to an undefeated record. C'mon, 17-0 is no fluke.
I didn't say the Dolphins were so-so, I said that they were not elite, and had a very favorable schedule that made it easier for them to win during the regular season, thereby increasing their chances of being lucky enough to not lose. 17-0 is most definitely a fluke compared to 16-1; it is a matter of one game that happens to go the other way. This year's Pats prove my point - down the stretch they had three games they could, and probably should, have lost. Would that have affected the question of how good they actually are in an objective sense one bit? Of course not. To think that they go from being just "excellent" to being "the best team of all time" simply because in the Ravens game they got two penalty calls on 4th down down the stretch (one of which being ticky-tacky at best) is absurd. I'm no consipiracy theorist, but even Pats fans agree that they were lucky to beat all three of the Eagles, Ravens, and Giants. The definition of the work fluke is "an accidental advantage; stroke of good luck", which is exactly what happened to them. People pay far too much attention to random (fluke) occurrences (thinking that these fluke occurrences are more representative of the true situation than they really are) all the time, and thereby make fundamental errors of understanding of randomness. It's very well-understood; Daniel Kahneman won the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2002 for his work (with Amos Tversky) on the phenomenon, starting with their paper in the Psychological Bulletin in 1971 called "Belief in the Law of Small Numbers." I guarantee you that you won't find any statistician who thinks that the most important way (or even a very important way) to determine the quality of a team in a short season is by something like whether they went undefeated or not (it would be different in a long season, of course, but the point is that anything close to an undefeated season would never happen in a long season). Actually, despite him getting my name wrong wink, dubagedi's post hits on the distinction very well - an undefeated season could quite reasonably be the most important criterion in determining the best season ever, since that is an evaluation of the observed games, but it says relatively little about determining the best team ever, since that is an evaluation of the unknown strength of the teams. It's the distinction between a sample and a population.
We are discussing best single season effort by a team. When making comparisons across different eras, we should not play the time machine game. Would the 1985 Bears be able to defeat the 2007 Patriots if the game was played under 2007 rules? What if it were played under 1985 rules? If these teams play three games (one at Soldier Field, one at Gillette Stadium, and one at a neutral site), does Soldier Field have a rug like it did in 1985 or does it have grass? The only thing we can do is compare the dominance of the teams. How dominant were the Bears in 1985? How dominant were the Patriots in 2007? When we determine which team was more dominant, then we have our winner.
Well, that is most definitely not what WhiteShoeWillie's tournament is about, and I doubt that that is what most people here have been debating when the 72 Dolphins come up.
Why do you write that they were not elite? It is a fact that their regular season schedule was not very formidable. However, I am positive that the 1972 Dolphins did not have the easiest schedule of the decade. The 1971 Cowboys had an easier schedule, I believe. I am certain one of the Vikings teams had the easiest schedule of the decade. The 1972 Dolphins postseason schedule was difficult because they had to play at Pittsburgh and they played the best NFC team in the Super Bowl. Multiple Hall of Famers can be found on the 1972 Dolphins roster. The team was coming off a Super Bowl appearance and therefore, teams did gun for them. This was not a team that somehow quietly went undefeated.
