Jon Bois is very good. At stuff.
In his newest installment of Chart Party, he looks at the last 30 years of NFL history for each of the league’s 32 teams as to how volatile they are year-to-year:
All teams, of course, have their ups and downs, but some are much more unpredictable than others. I’ve ranked them all from least to most volatile — in other words, how wildly they fluctuate from year to year in the win-loss columns.
Spoiler alert: How volatile have the Los Angeles/St. Louis/Los Angeles Rams been over the last 30 years?
Spoiler alert answer: Very.
Here’s your last 30 years via PFR:
And here’s Bois’ charting:
My random notes:
- Part of what makes this interesting is where it starts for the Rams. It comes at the tail end of the best extended run in franchise history. The chart kicks off in 1987 which, obviously, excludes the 1973-86 run for the Rams in which they made the playoffs in 12 of 14 years. So this chart only picks up the tail end of the John Robinson era…
- …which adjoins to the plummeting second Chuck Knox era into the 1990s Rams. What a wasteland. The two periods Bois points out are the final years in LA from 1992-94 and the first three in St. Louis from 1995-97 in which the Rams had a winning record and then successively got worse.
- BUT HEY! THINGS GOT BETTER REAL QUICK! GREATEST SHOW ON TURF! SUPER BOWLS! HALL OF FAME! GLORY DAYS!
- And then things got worse real quick.
- And then TST came along in September of 2006.
- And then we never won again.
- Ever.
- Not even once.
- And no, it’s not worth really discussing anything since 2009.
The last 30 years of Rams football have been by and large an exercise in pain with a short burst of joy. I wouldn’t trade it for anything, but I sure as hell wouldn’t mind spending more time above .500.