The Seattle Seahawks didn't need any further confirmation of this fact, but Nate Silver, originally of Baseball Prospectus and more recently of FiveThirtyEight, recently declared the NFC West champions the worst team in NFL Playoff history. Before everyone in St. Louis calls their Seattle friend collect, I'd like to add that he also calls the 2004 St. Louis Rams the second-worst team in NFL Playoff history.
↵The Seahawks went into the playoffs with a point differential of 97 points, a little more than six points per game—to 2.4 for the 2010 Rams. But the 2004 Rams, Mike Martz's last gasp, went into the playoffs (and also won a game) despite a point differential of 73 points. That year the Rams had huge years from Marc Bulger and a combination of Marshall Faulk and Steven Jackson and still scored just 319 points, thanks to a takeaway differential of nearly 1.5 a game. (That's just nine points more than the Seahawks scored in 2010, with a gimpy Matt Hasselbeck and no running game to speak of.)
↵So if the Seahawks are the worst team in playoff history, the Rams beating them in Week 17 would only have made some other Rams team the worst in their absence.
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