There have been a total of 57 Super Bowl champions since the NFL-AFL merger in 1966 and four of those titles belong to the New York Giants.
Where do those Giants teams stack up against the other 53? Well, if you were to ask Aaron Schatz of ESPN, he’d tell you that two of them are among the worst ever.
Schatz recently ranked all 57 Super Bowl championship teams using proprietary DVOA ratings and concluded that the 2007 and 2011 Giants were bad teams who just happened to win a pair of Super Bowls.
56. 2011 New York Giants (13-7, 10.9%)
Four years after the greatest Super Bowl upset of all time, the Giants were back at it. They again took down Tom Brady and the dynasty New England Patriots.
Based on his formula, Schatz was unimpressed. He has the 2011 Giants as the second-worst team to ever hoist the Lombardi Trophy.
The 2011 Giants are the only Super Bowl champion in history to get outscored during the regular season, although they did face the third-toughest schedule of the season and thus finished 13th in regular-season DVOA. They lost four straight games in the middle of the season to drop from 6-2 to 6-6, but then finished 3-1 and won a very mediocre NFC East at 9-7.
In the playoffs, the Giants had big wins over the Falcons and Packers and survived the 49ers in overtime. In Super Bowl XLVI, the Giants pulled off a 21-17 win against a Patriots team that had the worst defense to ever play in a Super Bowl.
Only the 1970 Baltimore Colts were worse.
53. 2007 New York Giants (14-6, 13.6%)
The most magical team in Super Bowl history is also among the worst, says Schatz. Only four teams ranked lower than the 2007 Giants and as noted above, one of those was the 2011 Giants.
While Washington in 1987 had the lowest regular-season DVOA of any Super Bowl champion, the 2007 Giants had the lowest rank, coming in just 15th at 4.5% DVOA. They finished second in the NFC East behind the Cowboys but went on a legendary run through the playoffs. The victories were close, but they all came on the road over teams that were fantastic during the regular season. They beat No. 8 Tampa Bay 24-14, No. 3 Dallas 21-17 and No. 4 Green Bay 23-20. And of course, the pièce de résistance was the 17-14 victory over the previously undefeated No. 1 Patriots in Super Bowl XLII.
30. 1990 New York Giants (16-3, 30.2%)
The 1990 Giants hung on to defeat the powerhouse Buffalo Bills in the Super Bowl but that still landed them in just the bottom half of Schatz’s rankings.
Interestingly, Schatz notes that the 1990 Giants were the league’s best in terms of regular season DVOA that year and were in the same ballpark as the Bills based on his metrics.
There’s a general sense that 1990 was the best Bills team and the Giants stole Super Bowl XXV from a superior opponent when kicker Scott Norwood went wide right. The DVOA metric disagrees. The 1990-1992 Bills all come out about the same, and the Giants were truly the better team during the 1990 regular season. We’re almost halfway through the list of Super Bowl champions and this is the first team that ranked No. 1 in DVOA during the regular season. New York was seventh on offense, second on defense and second on special teams.
The Giants blew out Chicago 31-3 in the divisional round before finishing up with two very close wins: 15-13 over San Francisco in the NFC championship and then 20-19 over the Bills when Norwood missed the field goal in the Super Bowl.
So… Why No. 30?
27. 1986 New York Giants (17-2, 30.7%)
The most dominant defensive team in Giants history couldn’t crack the top 25. That is largely due to the poor offensive play for much of the regular season.
The Giants were third in the NFL in DVOA for 1986, finishing ninth on offense, third on defense and 11th on special teams. Their point differential suggested a team going 12-4 rather than 14-2. But any talk about the Giants being “overrated” disappeared after they beat the 49ers by the stunning score of 49-3 in the divisional round. Jim Burt knocked Joe Montana out of the game with a quarterback hit in the second quarter as Montana threw a pick-six to Lawrence Taylor. This game has the highest single-game rating of any game in DVOA history (147%).
But the Giants weren’t done with the dominating wins. They shut out Washington 17-0 in the NFC championship, with Washington getting just 2.7 net yards per play. Then they easily won Super Bowl XXI over the Broncos, taking a 33-10 lead early in the fourth quarter before a 39-20 final.
In case you were wondering, it was the 1991 Washington Redskins — not the 1985 Chicago Bears — who took the top spot in Schatz’s rankings.
