Dan Orlovsky thinks the 0-16 Detroit Lions would beat the NY Jets

The NY Jets are so bad that Dan Orlovsky thinks the 0-16 Detroit Lions would beat them.

The NY Jets are a really bad football team, likely the worst in the NFL at the moment. But just how bad are the Jets from a historical standpoint?

At least one NFL analyst seems to think that they are as bad if not worse than one of the only two teams to ever go 0-16 in a season. And this particular analyst just so happened to be the starting quarterback of the fateful team in question.

The analyst we’re talking about is Dan Orlovsky who spent over a decade in the NFL before becoming an ESPN analyst shortly after his retirement in 2017.

Orlovsky started only 12 games in his NFL career, but seven of those starts came with the Detroit Lions during their infamous 2008 season when they became the first team in NFL history to go 0-16.

They held that distinction until the 2017 Cleveland Browns joined them as the second team to “accomplish” such a feat. Those two teams are viewed as perhaps the worst two squads in NFL history.

But could the 2020 Jets soon be joining that ill-famed conversation? Orlovsky seems to think it’s possible.

During the Jets’ Week 3 domination at the hands of the Indianapolis Colts, Orlovsky took to Twitter to express his disgust with the Jets’ organization.

And he fired what was perhaps the shot of the evening when he insisted that “my 0-16 [Lions] would beat the Jets 16 times.” That’s quite the claim seeing as though that Lions team is unanimously viewed as perhaps the worst team in NFL history.

Could the Jets really be that bad? It’s certainly plausible.

Are the NY Jets really worse than the 2008 Detroit Lions?

Both teams entered the season following 7-9 campaigns where they succeeded in spite of their head coach — Rod Marinelli was Detroit’s clipboard leader. Both teams suffered some pretty significant injuries with Detroit even losing starting QB Jon Kitna for the season.

But as crazy as this might sound, that Lions team arguably had more talent.

For starters, they had Calvin Johnson who is a better player than anyone currently on the Jets. But even from a team-wide perspective, the current Jets through three weeks of the season are statistically worse than the 2008 Lions were.

Detroit had the sixth-worst offense in the NFL in terms of points per game and only the ninth-worst passing offense. The Jets are currently dead last by a wide margin in both categories.

Now, their defense was worst in the league by a pretty substantial mark, but the 2020 Jets are actually averaging more passing yards allowed per game than the Lions did in 2008. Perhaps you could chalk that up to the changing times in the NFL, though.

Either way, the fact that we are having this discussion in the first place is an indication of just how bad the Jets have looked through three weeks.

They haven’t been competitive. They haven’t looked like they belong on an NFL field. And unless something changes soon, they may be destined to join the Lions and Browns as the third 0-16 team in NFL history.

At the very least, we can all be thankful that the world will never see a “fantasy” matchup between the 2008 Lions and the 2020 Jets.