On Sunday, Sept. 3, 2000, the NFL inaugurated its first season to begin with a “2.” It was, to put things charitably, a different time. There was no opening night with the defending champs on Thursday or an international game on Friday (or any other game outside of the United States all season). No games were watched in high definition. The yellow, on-screen first-down line was roughly two years old. Patrick Mahomes was a pitcher on the Mets; his son was about to turn 5. Tom Brady was a healthy scratch after making the Patriots’ roster in training camp; the guy who kept him, Bill Belichick, was taking over his first game as New England’s coach.
The NFL we’re about to watch in 2025 is very different, both in terms of aesthetic and presentation, than the one you followed 25 years ago. Offenses and defenses have evolved pre- and post-snap, although some innovations are clever repackagings of past concepts. Rules have changed. NFL teams that might not have needed or wanted computers 25 years ago are sorting through player tracking data. It’s almost impossible to pluck teams from two decades ago and compare them to the teams playing now.
Good thing it’s only almost impossible, because guess what we’re doing today? That’s right: With 25 seasons in the books since the world celebrated the birth of the third millennium, I’m picking the 25 best teams of the past 25 years of professional football. If you could somehow take those 25 top teams from the past quarter century and get them to play one another, who would end up on top?
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That’s the question I’m trying to answer below, which requires some explanation. There are lots of ways to try to answer this question. Should it be a measure of which team was most successful? Which teams played the best on a snap-by-snap basis? Should I consider each team at its peak or over the entire season? What about accounting for shorter schedules and different playoff rules?
I tried to strike a balance. My goal is to find the best team if all of these teams could play each other in what amounts to a time-traveling Champions League of the past quarter century. I considered what every team did over the course of the entire season, all the way from Week 1 through the playoffs, as the best measure of its true underlying level of play. I tried to account for injuries to emulate what we actually saw play out during each team’s real season. The 2017 Eagles, for example, are going to have Nick Foles start about 31% of the time, since he took over for an injured Carson Wentz and played six of their 19 total games during their run to Super Bowl LII.
At the same time, I wanted to reward teams that won championships. I weighted postseason performance as more significant than what happened during the regular season. I looked for teams that dominated their opposition, especially when those opponents were also among the league’s best. I wanted to favor teams that were complete and controlled both sides of the ball, but I didn’t want to leave out true outliers that were generationally impactful on offense or defense, especially if they rode those successes into the Super Bowl.
To compare their performance, with limited data for the earlier years of the century, I kept things simple. I measured each team’s scoring offense and defense per game, including its postseason figures, and then normalized them against the league average. I’m going to include each team’s percentile rank on offense and defense over the past 25 years by this measure, a number that is better when higher, with 100 as the peak. Where available, I tried to use advanced metrics to get more insight into each team’s level of play.
I also focused on sustainable and strong underlying levels of play as opposed to teams that were spectacular in close games or managed to squeeze out victories each week. While all of the teams here won plenty of games, this isn’t a list of win totals. As a good example, the 2024 Chiefs went 15-2 while winning close games with blocked field goals, fumbled snaps and bad game management by the opposing coach, but they weren’t that caliber of team from their underlying level of play. You saw what happened to them against stiff competition in Super Bowl LIX. They didn’t make this list.
Finally, I measured strength of schedule using the Pythagorean formula. For each opponent a team faced in a given season, I calculated its points scored and points allowed in games not involving that team, then built an expected winning percentage off that formula. (In other words, to measure how tough of an opponent the Ravens were for the Steelers in a given year, I calculated how the Ravens performed in every game they played that didn’t involve the Steelers.) Weighting for how often each team played each opponent, this average schedule difficulty helped inform the path each team took during its season.
With all of that in mind, for all the math and analysis, I asked myself one question when I was comparing a pair of teams on the list: Given everything we saw from each of these two teams over the course of their entire seasons, which would win if they met on a neutral field? Sometimes, that led to contradictory answers: There are teams on this list that lost to other teams that didn’t make it or even come close. That might seem counterintuitive given that you literally saw that team win, but what happens on one day won’t necessarily happen again. The Bills have beaten the Chiefs four straight times in the regular season; you know how things have gone when they’ve met in the playoffs.
I’ll start with the honorable mention, then count down the best teams of the past 25 years:
Jump to a legendary team:
2000 Ravens | 2002 Bucs
2007 Patriots | 2010 Packers
2019 Chiefs | 2024 Eagles