Never underestimate the depths to which the NFC South can sink.
There’s a million ways to sum up how historically awful that division is, but this needs to be the first way after Week 14: The Carolina Panthers, at 4-8-1, will be a half-game out of first place if the Atlanta Falcons lose Monday night at Green Bay (spoiler alert: The Falcons aren’t going to win that game).
The Panthers destroyed the New Orleans Saints 41-10 in the Superdome on Sunday. The Saints used to be unbeatable there, but they’re not even good there anymore. They’ve lost four in a row at home and the implosion against a bad Panthers team that was 1-7-1 since Week 2 is a low point.
It’s a low point not just for the Saints, but for the division.
Perhaps you want to argue that the Panthers have re-emerged as a fine team, but we all know that’s incorrect. They’re bad. The Saints were just much worse. The only time the Saints showed any desire to battle on the field was after Cam Newton celebrated a touchdown and a brawl started. If the Saints had been that fired up between the whistles, maybe they would have looked like an NFL team on Sunday.
The Saints are back to 5-8, and the division is back to trending toward a champ with double-digit losses. Whoever that team is won’t deserve to make the playoffs, and definitely won’t deserve to host a wild-card game against a team that might have four more wins, but they will anyway because those are the rules. That needs to be re-examined in the offseason, at very least the part about a division champion automatically hosting a playoff game. The 2014 NFC South doesn’t deserve that privilege, and it’s an embarrassment for the NFL that it’ll happen. But it’s not changing, at least not before the end of the year.
No matter what happens with the NFC South the rest of the way, Sunday proved again that nobody has earned the right to be called a champion there.
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