The Decade Test: Why We're Getting Team Greatness All Wrong, From the Packers to Mahomes

There's a cultural impulse in sports that we need to talk about. Every few years, someone assembles a list of the greatest teams by decade and calls it settled history. The Packers of the 1960s. The Cowboys of the 1970s. The 49ers of the 1980s. The Cowboys again in the 1990s. The Patriots of the 2000s. The Patriots again, or sometimes the Seahawks, in the 2010s. The Chiefs now, obviously, in the 2020s. And we all nod along as if these conclusions materialized from objective facts rather than selective memory, contemporary bias, and the particular metrics that flatter whichever team we're currently discussing. The problem with the decade-by-decade greatness ranking is not the exercise itself. It's that we've never actually defined what we're measuring.

Start here: are we looking for the greatest single season team? The most dominant stretch across multiple years? The team that won the most? The team that played the best football? The franchise that most influenced how the game is played going forward? These are not the same thing. They produce wildly different answers. And the NFL, unlike other sports, makes this problem exponentially harder because of how the league itself has changed. We're comparing teams across different eras with different salary cap structures, different playoff formats, different rules governing player movement, different defensive schemes, and in some cases, different numbers of teams in the league altogether. The 1960s Packers won three consecutive championships. The 2019 Chiefs won one Super Bowl. Saying one is "greater" than the other requires us to establish some kind of mathematical constant that nobody has actually agreed upon.

Let's start with the uncomfortable truth about the very early decades. The NFL in the 1920s and 1930s was not a professional league by any modern standard. Teams folded overnight. Players worked other jobs in the offseason. The "championship" was determined not by a playoff but by winning percentage, which meant a team with two wins and zero losses was mathematically crowned a champion even if they'd played only two games. Saying the 1925 Pottsville Maroons were "great" because they went 8-0 is technically true, but it's a meaningless comparison to literally any other era of football. Yet historians still do this. They still slot these teams into narratives about dynasty and dominance as if the context doesn't matter. It matters enormously.

The Vince Lombardi Packers of the 1960s occupy a different universe entirely in terms of legitimacy. Green Bay won three consecutive NFL championships before the AFL-NFL merger created the Super Bowl. They then won the first two Super Bowls. The argument for them as a dynasty is overwhelming. But here's what nobody really wants to discuss: they benefited from a league that was still consolidating, from the fact that the draft was beginning to function as a true mechanism for competitive balance, and from the simple reality that their division was not particularly strong. The Packers were great. They were also fortunate. Both things can be true.

When we move into the 1970s, the argument becomes sharper. The Pittsburgh Steelers won four Super Bowls in six years. They did this with the Steel Curtain defense, arguably the greatest defensive unit in NFL history. They drafted brilliantly. They developed a system that worked across multiple generations of players. But the 1970s NFL was also fundamentally different from today's game. Defense could be played more aggressively. Secondary players could mug receivers. Pass rushers weren't as constrained by rules protecting quarterbacks. Saying the Steelers defense was superior because they allowed fewer points per game ignores that the entire rule structure was fundamentally different. This doesn't diminish what they accomplished. It contextualizes it.

The Dallas Cowboys dominated the 1970s in other ways. They were more consistently excellent across the decade, appearing in five Super Bowls compared to Pittsburgh's four. They won two. They built a franchise culture that sustained excellence in ways the Steelers' approach did not always allow. The Cowboys of the 1970s proved something that Pittsburgh proved as well: consistent excellence matters, maybe even more than individual championship moments. But again, we're forced to choose between greatness metrics that nobody has standardized.

Jump to the 1980s and San Francisco appears inevitably. Bill Walsh's 49ers won four Super Bowls in 14 seasons and fundamentally changed how football is played. The West Coast offense became the dominant system in football. Steve Young and Jerry Rice and Ronnie Lott created a template for excellence that franchises still emulate. The argument for the 1980s 49ers is stronger than almost any other because they won championships, changed the game itself, and did both across a sufficient time span that luck can't explain it. Yet the 1980s also saw the emergence of the Washington Redskins as a legitimate contender, the Cowboys' brief resurgence, and the 1985 Bears, who won 15 games and a Super Bowl with one of the most dominant seasons any team has ever produced. Saying the 49ers were the greatest franchise of the decade is probably right. Saying they had the greatest single season might be wrong.

The 1990s Cowboys are nearly impossible to argue against if you're looking at accumulated excellence. Three Super Bowls in four years. The salary cap created by the 1993 CBA meant that winning repeatedly became mathematically harder. The Cowboys did it anyway, through a combination of draft skill, free agent acquisition, and sustained coaching. The 49ers won one more Super Bowl at the end of the decade, but the Cowboys defined the era. They also benefited from landing Troy Aikman, Michael Irvin, and Emmitt Smith in consecutive draft years, and they had the good fortune to do this at a moment when salary cap constraints hadn't fully kicked in. Again, greatness and good luck are not mutually exclusive.

The 2000s belonged to the Patriots. That sentence should be relatively uncontroversial. New England won three Super Bowls in four years. They appeared in four Super Bowls in nine seasons. They won 16 regular season games four times. They made the AFC Championship game nine straight years. Tom Brady and Bill Belichick created the most sustained excellence in modern NFL history. But here's what gets glossed over: the 2000s AFC East was often weak, particularly the Jets and Bills. The Patriots' divisional scheduling advantage was real. The 2004 season was abbreviated by injury to Brady. The early 2000s Patriots also benefited from a salary cap structure that was less restrictive than it would become. None of this diminishes their accomplishment. It explains part of how they pulled it off.

The 2010s represent a genuinely difficult choice. The Patriots won Super Bowls in 2014 and 2018, appearing in five. The Seahawks won back-to-back appearances in 2013 and 2014, building a defense that was genuinely innovative. The Chiefs won one Super Bowl in the 2010s but built a franchise that would dominate the next decade. Which team defines the 2010s? The answer depends on whether you're measuring sustained excellence, peak performance, or influence on how the game is played going forward. The Seahawks influenced defensive strategy. The Patriots won more. The Chiefs built better. These are three different answers to the same question.

Now we arrive at the 2020s, and the Chiefs are the default answer. Patrick Mahomes has won two Super Bowls in three appearances. He's dragged a franchise that was mediocre for 50 years into consistent championship contention. The question here is whether we're measuring a decade that's only partially complete. We're three years into the 2020s. Are we really ready to declare the Chiefs as the greatest team of the 2020s when we have seven more years to go? That's the bias of the present moment. We see excellence happening right now and we project it indefinitely into the future. The Chiefs might win three more Super Bowls this decade. They might win one more and then fade. We simply don't know.

The actual answer to which team is greatest by decade is this: it depends entirely on what metrics matter to you. If you care about championships, that's one answer. If you care about consistency, it's another. If you care about changing how the game is played, it's another still. If you care about average point differential, margin of victory, strength of schedule adjusted winning percentage, or any of a dozen other measurements, you get different results.

What we should do instead of ranking is contextualizing. The Packers won when there were 12 teams in the league. The Steelers won when defense was barely constrained by rule. The 49ers won by inventing a new offensive system. The Patriots won by exploiting a salary cap system and a weak conference. The Chiefs are winning with the greatest individual talent at quarterback the league has ever seen, playing in an era where teams are explicitly allowed to revolve around their elite QB. These accomplishments exist in different contexts. None of them are diminished by that context.