Best Four-Year Stretches in NFL History

One of the reasons I watch the NFL is because I like seeing history. And the great thing about history is that it's happening all around us, all the time. A few weeks ago, Russell Wilson completed the 2nd-best five-game stretch by a QB in NFL history, and recently the rest of the Seahawks have raised their level of play as well. Seattle finished 1st in the league in scoring defense, 2nd in SRS (after Arizona and ahead of Cincinnati, Kansas City, Pittsburgh, and Carolina, in that order), and, most notably, 1st in DVOA.

DVOA may be the best available metric for rating a team's performance, and Seattle has finished first in the league an unprecedented four years in a row. So naturally, this led to the question: Is this the best four-year stretch for a team in NFL history?

We'll get to the answer in a second, but first a word on methodology. My primary goal was to measure sustained success, and the best way to do that is team stats. The best available team stat is DVOA, so that's where I started. (Since DVOA only goes back to '91, I used historical estimates for previous years.) But that being said, playoff success matters. Making a Super Bowl is a big sign of team success (well, usually--those are two links), and winning one is more important than anything.

As a fan, I would rather my team win one Super Bowl and miss the playoffs the next three years than make the NFC championship every year and lose, even though the latter team might theoretically be better overall. But more importantly, since we're looking at sustained success, we don't want any one-year wonders. I decided to focus on teams that made at least two Super Bowls in a four-year span (which naturally limits me to the Super Bowl era, which I'm fine with). I also left in teams that didn't win a Super Bowl, mostly because I was curious how they'd end up, but also because making the Super Bowl multiple times in a four-year stretch is impressive even if you don't win.

Finally, I gave every Super Bowl-winning team a bonus, because I consider the Super Bowl to be the one game where winning really does matter, even if it doesn't necessarily reflect how good the teams in the game were.

It turns out there are 67 such stretches (more or less), including overlaps (and next year at least one, 2013-16 Seattle's, will qualify). Some of these teams were amazing; some were overrated; some were barely above league average, if that. I'll include commentary.

The Best Four-Year Stretches in NFL History:

1. 2012-15 Seahawks. That's right. The single greatest four-year stretch by any team in NFL history belongs to these Seattle Seahawks. From their dominant running game to their dominant defense to their dominant passing game, there wasn't really anything these Seahawks did badly. Except block. But that gets mitigated when you have one of the greats under center. Whose all-time great team is that? That's Russell Wilson's all-time great team.
2. 1992-95 Cowboys. This team was amazing. Starring Troy Aikman, Emmitt Smith, Michael Irvin, and probably the greatest offensive line ever assembled, these Boys won three Super Bowls in four years. In their off year, they won 12 games and made the conference championship, losing to an amazing 49ers team. And they did all this in a VERY strong NFC, which was in the midst of 13 straight championships over the AFC. Wow.
3. 1974-77 Steelers. Get ready for a lot of black and yellow. The 70s Steelers alone have four teams in the top 10 and five in the top 20. This is mostly due to an incredibly dominant stretch from 1974-76, but they really didn't have a down year from '72 to '79. Over that stretch, three Steelers won DPOY (Joe Greene, Mel Blount, and Jack Lambert), their QB Terry Bradshaw won MVP, and coach Chuck Noll won COY, to name a few. And that's not to mention their excellent pair of WRs, Lynn Swann and John Stallworth. Again, wow.
4. 1986-89 49ers. What is there to say? Joe Montana, Jerry Rice, Ronnie Lott, and pals. What do you get when you mix one of the greatest coaches ever, one of the greatest QBs ever, hands down the greatest WR ever, and an elite defense together? You get this. I feel like saying "wow" again is overkill, but honestly it's amazing how great these teams are. These are the Pantheon.
5. 1973-76 Steelers.
6. 1987-90 49ers.
7. 1975-78 Steelers.
8. 1966-69 Chiefs. I'm kinda surprised by this one. You don't--or at least I didn't--think of the '60s Chiefs as being a dynasty, and certainly not the best dynasty of the early Super Bowl era. But here we are. According to DVOA, the Chiefs ranged from a dominant offense and an above-average defense ('66) to a dominant defense with an above-average offense ('69), which is pretty impressive to pull off in four years (unless you're the 2013-15 Broncos). Len Dawson led the offense, while all-everything safety Johnny Robinson and equally great linebacker Bobby Bell held down the defense. (Seriously, look them up, they dominated).
9. 1976-79 Steelers. See above. I have to say, it's incredibly impressive how dominant these Steelers teams have been. Every incarnation from '72-'75 to '76-'79 finished in the top 20, which basically means that for eight straight years they were as good as anyone on this list. I'm sure if I looked at the best eight-year stretches in history, Pitt would be at or near the top. Wow.
10. 1968-71 Cowboys. Here's the other Cowboys team, starring Roger Staubach, who's also the star of "Quarterbacks I Have A Hard Time Judging." (Or the co-star, with Johnny Unitas.)
11. 1993-96 Cowboys. And here's the first Cowboys team again.
12. 1971-74 Dolphins. Featuring the only team of the Super Bowl era to go undefeated through a regular and post-season, the '72 Dolphins. Stunningly the '73 Fins were actually better, at least according to DVOA, although they went 12-2.
13. 1988-91 49ers. More of Montana And Pals, but with special guest Steve Young, who showed up in '91 and went off on a historic tear for the next eight years. You won't see those Niners on this list; they only made one Super Bowl, in '94, because the NFC was so stacked at the time. If they did make the list, they'd be top-ten. They're also probably the best team not to qualify for this list (although I can't be sure of that).
14. 1972-75 Dolphins.
15. 1991-94 Cowboys.
16. 2004-07 Patriots. The Patriots are surprisingly poorly represented on this list. Here's why: They had a good year in '03, a great year in '04, but a down year in '05. In '06 they were pretty good, then in '07 they had one of the greatest years of all time. If the Pats had maintained their '04 level of play in '05 or '06, or even gotten very close to it, they might well be the #1 team on this list. But their awful '05 year and only-decent '06 year relegate them to this position. Two great years does not an elite four-year stretch make.
17. 1964-67 Packers. Here's the dynasty you'd expect to see from the '60s. (We're including pre-Super Bowl era Packers teams because they still did go to two Super Bowls during this span.) Vince Lombardi, Bart Starr, and about fifty Hall of Famers, you know the drill.
18. 1972-75 Steelers.
19. 2011-14 Seahawks. The other Seahawks team! The '11 Seahawks were actually a below-average team, so this is really riding on how great the team was from '12-'14.
20. 1975-78 Cowboys. More Cowboys, more Staubach. I'm starting to get why so many people (used to) hate the Cowboys. More than a third of this list (!!) is Dallas, Pittsburgh, and San Francisco. Of course, those teams have a combined two championships and four appearances in the new millennium, so maybe the tides are turning. (If the Seahawks win this year, they will singlehandedly match that output.)
21. 2008-11 Steelers. Because there's not enough of a Steelers presence on this list. These Steelers are mainly here because the '08 and '10 defenses were so good. Thank James Harrison and Troy Polamalu for that.
22. 1970-73 Cowboys. Cowboys, Staubach, unbelievable!
23. 1966-69 Packers.
24. 1974-77 Cowboys.
25. 1994-97 Packers. These are basically The Favre Years. Kid came into the league like some kinda madman. Ain't never seen a gunslinger like him. Favre won three straight MVPs from '95 to '97, two of which he deserved, and a Super Bowl in '96, which he definitely deserved. I'm told the Packers also had other players but it's hard to be sure.
26. 2011-14 Patriots. Here's the other decent Patriots stretch, and it's not great. They were good-to-very-good across the board, but never broke into that top echelon.
27. 1965-68 Packers. See above.
28. 1995-98 Broncos. So I'm not a big Elway fan. But his Broncos were good for three years in the '90s. The '98 Broncos even bordered on great, and I'll defend Terrell Davis's '98 campaign as one of the greatest in the league's history (2008 yards and 21 TDs is quite literally unprecedented, and 5.1 YPC is nothing to scoff at) till the day I die.
29. 1996-99 Broncos. But they're not as great as people want to remember.
30. 2007-10 Steelers. This is just a worse extension of the '08-'11 Steelers.
31. 1970-73 Dolphins. And this is a worse extension on the '70s Fins.
32. 1976-79 Cowboys. Ditto.
33. 1997-2000 Broncos. Ditto.
34. 1999-2002 Rams. The '99 Rams are one of my favorite teams ever. They're also one of the greatest teams ever, and the '01 Rams were very, very good as well. The only problem is the team sucked in '98 and '02 and was only pretty good in '00. That inconsistency hurts them, but it's also sort of Kurt Warner's whole deal. If you can't handle him at his worst, you don't deserve him at his best, and his best is some of the best we've ever seen. (If you're the kind of person who believes that being good in the playoffs is different from being good in the regular season, Warner is your guy.)
35. 1969-72 Cowboys. So the Cowboys were good for a long time.
36. 2003-06 Patriots. It's crazy that a team that won two Super Bowls and had a team as good as the '04 Pats is this far down. But that's what a season like '05 does to you.
37. 1977-80 Steelers.
38. 1977-80 Cowboys. Oh wow it's the Cowboys again.
39. 1998-2001 Rams. This doesn't actually hurt the Rams that much since their bookend years, '98 and '02, were both pretty bad.
40. 2005-08 Steelers.
41. 1995-98 Packers. More Favre, just with a slightly worse angle.
42. 2006-09 Colts. As this is the ONLY Indianapolis Colts stretch on the board, I feel the need to mention that despite their impressive consistency, the Colts were never actually that good. They never actually ascended to the heights we saw from, say, the '99 Rams, or the '07 Pats, or the '13 Seahawks. They just won a lot of games for a lot of years. Even 2004 was more of an amazing season for Peyton than it was an amazing season for the Colts. Turns out there's a difference between being a consistently excellent team for a very long time, and being a truly great team.
43. 2002-05 Pats. More Pats mediocrity. Typical.
44. 1981-84 49ers. Here are the early Niners, from the early Montana/Walsh days, before Jerry Rice was even in the league. Naturally they were a lot worse. But the '84 team was so good that they still end up in a decent position.
45. 1996-99 Packers. And here's Favre's Packers again.
46. 1978-81 Steelers. And the tail end of the '70s Steelers.
47. 1973-76 Vikings. This one is interesting. You might think--and I've said before--that winning a single game in the NFL is not necessarily proof that you're the better team. Many times, the best team in the league has lost the Super Bowl (e.g. the 2014 Seahawks, 2007 Patriots, 2001 Rams, etc.). On many other occasions the best team in the league has failed to even make the Super Bowl. So a reasonable person might suspect that a team who made four Super Bowls in a short span (which the Vikings did, from '69 to '76), even if they lost all four, might still be a very good team. It's theoretically possible, albeit very unlikely, that they were even the best team every year: If the better team should be expected to win 60% of the time in each Super Bowl, the odds of them going 0-4 is 2.56%. Even if we consider the Vikings a significantly worse team than the winner every year and give them 40% odds of winning any given Super Bowl, their odds of going 0-4 is only 12.96%. So maybe it's damning that the Vikings lost all of their Super Bowls. DVOA certainly backs the hypothesis that they weren't actually a particularly good team: their best single-year DVOA was 22.3 (in '75 and '76), which is below the average four-year DVOA of the top 45 teams on this list. More on this later.
48. 1967-70 Colts. To clarify this is the Baltimore Colts. This is the era of Johnny Unitas, who's kind of enigmatic in the QB discussion. Some people call him the greatest QB ever, but his statistics (even relative to his peers) don't support that claim. That being said, a lot of old guys (by which I mean anyone active before 1980, and especially before the 1970 merger) are really hard to judge, even in context. For instance, Otto Graham dominated the league back in the '40s and '50s, and his 1953 Browns supposedly had the greatest pass offense of all time. Is he really better than Peyton, Brady, Rodgers, and Wilson? Almost certainly not. So again, it's hard to judge.
49. 1980-83 Redskins. According to DVOA and virtually no one else, the best team since 1989 (and of all time) is the 1991 Washington Redskins. Unfortunately, no four-year span including that season qualifies for this list (and even if they did, the Redskins' other seasons in that timeframe were bad enough that they wouldn't be very high). The few spans that do qualify aren't particularly notable, although it is very impressive that the Skins contended for four Super Bowls in ten years, winning three, each with a different starting quarterback (Joe Theismann, Jay Schroeder, and Mark Rypien). That's really a testament to how great a coach Joe Gibbs was.
50. 1981-84 Redskins. But DVOA doesn't care about how impressive your coach is, only how well your team plays.
51. 1972-75 Vikings. The Vikings' Super Bowl teams ranked t-1st, 5th, 6th, and 4th in DVOA. The teams they lost to ranked t-1st, 1st, 2nd, and 7th. So they're not as big a mismatch as the Bills (wait for it), but they're still clearly not a dynasty. For the record, I firmly believe that Alan Page, who held down the Vikings' DL from '67 to '81, is the greatest DT ever and one of the top five defensive players ever. But one defensive player can't make a team, no matter how hard he tries. The Vikings did have an elite defense from 1969-72, but their offense was so bad in that span that it didn't count for much (and they made only one Super Bowl, in '69).
52. 1974-77 Vikings. And one good player, or one good unit, is not enough to do well on this list. This is very much a metric of how good a team is. And yes, most of the top teams on here have their share of superstars and Hall of Famers, but having players like that doesn't necessarily make a team.
53. 1988-91 Bills. Here's the other team that made and lost four Super Bowls in a short span. The Bills did it in four years. Some people say that if the situation had been reversed, and the Bills had won all four Super Bowls, or perhaps even two or three of them, they'd be considered the greatest team of all time. And they might be considered that. But it wouldn't be true. Even if we give the Bills wins in every single Super Bowl they made, they still only move up to the mid-20s on this list.
54. 1989-92 Bills. And again, there's some reason to believe that the Bills actually were significantly worse than their NFC opponents in each of their Super Bowl years. The four opponents the Bills lost to, even without considering their Super Bowl winner bonuses, ranked 1st, 1st, 1st, and 2nd in the league in DVOA in the years they won. The Bills, meanwhile, ranked 6th, 4th, 7th, and 12th (!!) in their four Super Bowl years. This is not an all-time great team, and a couple lucky SB wins wouldn't have changed that.
55. 1990-93 Cowboys. Did you forget about the '90s Cowboys? Me neither.
56. 1982-85 Redskins.
57. 1982-85 Dolphins. Here's the best stretch from Marino's Dolphins. Turns out they weren't actually that great. Marino's '84 season is still one of the best ever, but again, this is a team metric, not an individual one, and none of the Dolphins' seasons were particularly notable.
58. 1968-71 Colts. More Unitas.
59. 1990-93 Bills. And more Buffalo. Don't worry, we're not even close to done with the Bills.
60. 1981-84 Dolphins. This stretch actually includes two years (1981-82) where the Dolphins didn't have Marino, because apparently they made a Super Bowl in '82, then drafted Marino the next year, and made one Super Bowl in his entire career. Weird. Anyway, as I mentioned before, the '80s Dolphins were never actually that good, which is why they're in the basement here.
61. 1971-74 Vikings. But not as far in the basement as these Vikings. I honestly don't get it.
62. 1991-94 Bills. Here are the last two Bills seasons. I'll take this opportunity to note that it's weird that there are two NFL teams who are 0-4 in Super Bowls, all within such a short span (4-8 years). It's weird.
63. 1992-95 Bills. And they've both been in existence since 1960. Which isn't that surprising; 13 of the 32 NFL teams have never won a Super Bowl, and quite a few of them (e.g. Cards, Eagles, Browns) are much older than the Bills and Vikings. The surprising part is the 0/4. The next-most appearances without a win is 2 (Philly and Cincinnati). The most appearances without a loss is 2 (Baltimore)--although San Francisco was, until 2012, 5-0 in Super Bowls.
64. 1984-87 Broncos. And here is the rest of Elway's career. Down at the bottom, where it belongs.
65. 1986-89 Broncos.
66. 1980-83 Raiders. And the Raiders, who won the Super Bowl with a 0 DVOA (i.e. as an average team) and put up a truly atrocious season the next year, only to win the Super Bowl again two years later. Weird.
67. 1985-88 Broncos. Haha. Elway.

Few Seahawks notes. First, if you take out the Super Bowl weighting, the Seahawks stay where they are. Just saying. Second, these Seahawks can still move up if they win the Super Bowl. They'd still obviously be #1, but they'd be a bigger #1. Third, even if they miss the Super Bowl this year, the 2013-16 Seahawks will qualify for this list. If they do as well as they've been doing, they could easily find themselves occupying the top two spots on this list.

P.S. I'm just gonna say it: There are mistakes in this list. I probably left out some teams. I almost certainly messed up some numbers. I tracked down as many mistakes as I could, but I very well might have missed some. What's more, historical DVOA is unreliable and modern DVOA is inexplicably inconsistent, so even if I got the numbers right they may not agree with the ones you find. I don't expect anyone to fact-check me, but if you happen to spot a mistake, let me know so I can correct it. (For reference, the Super Bowl winner bonus is +10% DVOA--that's 10 percentage points, not 10% of their DVOA--for the single year.)