Bad things suck, and I’m not about to gatekeep feeling bad about a team. There are different layers of bad. Being a fan of a bad team that doesn’t have a first-round draft pick is bad; being a fan of a Super Bowl contender that’s playing like one of the worst teams in the NFL is also bad.
It’s all terrible. Maybe it’s a different kind of terrible, but it’s still terrible. This is the NFL Misery Index, a look at the teams who have wasted talent, time and opportunity in the 2025. From quarterback disasters to coaching stagnation, welcome to football purgatory.
Pittsburgh Steelers: Stuck in neutral
The Browns and the Steelers are perpetually miserable. For the past 35 years, the Browns have been awful. That’s not news.
The Steelers are a little bit different. Mike Tomlin has been their head coach since 2007, and they’ve never had a losing season under him. They also haven’t had a playoff win since 2017. That’s not news.
What is news is that now it seems like they’re on the verge of parting ways with Tomlin. That’s a tough spot to be (I assume). On top of that, the whole Aaron Rodgers thing shockingly didn’t work out, and they’re probably going to have a first-round draft pick in the range of 15-21 once again. It’s just more of the same old Steelers, but with the twist of a potential new head coach.
Cincinnati Bengals: A wasted Joe Burrow season
In the offseason, the Bengals moved on from their defensive coordinator, Lou Anarumo. In 2024, they had one of the worst defenses in the NFL, and none of their young players were developing.
They hired Al Golden, who was the defensive coordinator at Notre Dame. When you hire a college coach, one of the big draws is that they know how to coach and develop younger players. It’s a good process.
Well, the Bengals' defense still stinks, and their first-round pick, Shemar Stewart, looked terrible before he went on the IR with a knee injury. Maybe everything will get better the more time Golden gets to build his guys, but it’s the Bengals, and they’re terrible at drafting players who aren’t named Joe Burrow and Ja’Marr Chase. Is Golden going to be able to turn turds into gold? Probably not.
It was another wasted season of Joe Burrow, who missed 10 games with the Turf Toe injury. This is the third year of his six-year career that Burrow has missed significant time because of an injury that needed surgery. That kind of stuff adds up eventually, and with the offensive lines that he keeps playing behind, it’s not crazy to think that he’s just going to keep taking more damage.
If things were going to turn around for the Bengals, change would have to start at the top. That means they’d have to get rid of their director of player personnel/general manager, Duke Tobin. But he’s had that job since 1999. That dude’s not going anywhere.
Minnesota Vikings and Atlanta Falcons: Quarterback disaster class
The Vikings and the Falcons are the same, but also the polar opposite. They both drafted quarterbacks in the first round of the 2024 draft: Michael Penix went to the Falcons with the 8th overall pick, and J.J. McCarthy went to the Vikings with the 10th overall pick.
Penix has been serviceable and might be good, whereas McCarthy is the spawn of JaMarcus Russell and Josh Rosen. But the Vikings have a very good coach with Kevin O’Connell, and the Falcons have a dud with Raheem Morris.
To sum it up, the Falcons are going to have to find a new head coach. The Vikings, on the other hand, are going to have to draft or trade for a quarterback in the offseason. That leads us to the stem of their misery.
For some reason, the Falcons thought they were going to be in real contention to be a superpower this season, so during the draft, they traded away their 2026 first-round pick to the Rams. It turns out that draft pick is more than likely going to be in the top-10. They’re a team that needs a lot of help, and not having a premium draft pick is going to haunt them.
The Vikings are in a different spot. With their 4-8 record, they’re currently in line to have the 11th overall pick. That’s normally fine, but four of the teams with better picks are also going to need a quarterback. And as of right now, there are only three great QBs available in the draft.
The Falcons are totally lost from a future team-building and coaching standpoint. The Vikings are lost because they put all their hopes into a massive draft bust, and now Justin Jefferson hates his life.
Buffalo Bills: Squandering the Josh Allen window
The Bills are in a peculiarly bad spot. Once Tom Brady left the Patriots, the AFC East was open for the taking. It just so happened that it synced up with the Bills drafting Josh Allen, who has become one of the best quarterbacks in the NFL. The Bills took advantage and ran the division for the past five years.
Unfortunately, they have not build a team around Allen. Instead, Brandon Beane used the results of games from last season to justify not adding receivers.
Now the Bills are mostly struggling on offense because receivers aren’t getting open. Is that Beane’s fault? Kind of. But it's also Joe Brady, their offensive coordinator, who isn’t doing a great job of scheming guys open. On top of that, Josh Allen hasn’t been throwing with the lethality we’ve seen in the past.
Instead, the Bills have been making their hay with their ground game, and that’s totally fine, but they’re not super great at it, and it’s been shut down a bunch. When it gets shut down, their stale passing game gets exposed, and the entire offense stalls out over and over again.
Compound that with a defense that is mega-injured and totally incapable of stopping the run, and it’s a combination that has led them to their 8-4 record. In the past, that’s been enough to keep them at the top of the division, but the Patriots have the best record in the NFL and (once again) have a stranglehold on the AFC East.
The misery for the Bills is that it’s looking a lot like they’re wasting Josh Allen. To be fair, they had a hell of an opportunity (multiple times), but then the whole ‘Mahomes in the playoffs’ thing kept happening. That’s what makes this season even more miserable: the Chiefs are losing games, and the AFC should be wide open for the Bills to take it. They just aren’t. It’s tough.
Philadelphia Eagles: A broken championship offense
This has nothing to do with the past. The Eagles won Super Bowl LIX and had one of the most dominant seasons in 2024. It was awesome, and no one will ever be able to take that away. If your brain is wired so that you can just bask in that success and anything that happens this season doesn't matter, then we’re all envious of you… Because the vast majority of this season has been absolutely zero fun.
The Eagles’ offense is incredibly high-powered, and it’s been doing nothing. They were non-competitive in their Week 5 and 6 losses, but came back with a vengeance in Weeks 7 and 8, where they scored a combined 66 points. Then the bye week hit and stunted all of their progress.
Since then, they put up 10 points on Green Bay, 16 points on Detroit, 21 points on Dallas, and 15 points on Chicago (only nine if you don’t count garbage time). It’s disgusting, but the lack of points isn’t the source of the misery. It’s the part where the offense has an incredibly high rate of three-and-outs, and the coaching staff has a complete refusal to make adjustments or prepare.
It’s not like this team moves the ball and then peters out in the red zone or fails on fourth downs. They simply run three plays and then get off the field. There’s no coordination, no juice and no happiness anywhere on the offensive side of the ball.
Now, you can’t put it all on coaching. The players haven’t been playing well either. You can list everyone who’s been underperforming, but it’s easier to say who’s been consistently playing well: DeVonta Smith. That’s it.
And it’s not like these guys have forgotten how to play football either. In that Week 12 game against the Cowboys, the Eagles moved the ball downfield easily on their first three drives. And then they turtled up, didn’t adjust and got slaughtered.
Now, the Eagles have a golden opportunity to change something about their offense (specifically the play-caller), and Nick Sirianni said that he’s not going to make that change. If they’re not willing to make changes, then nothing on this offense is going to change, and we’re in for another 2023-type season. And that sucks too.
Oh, and the Eagles are on the In-Season Hard Knocks, so we get an in-depth look at this catastrophe. It’s awful over here.