We started with the plainest measure there is, average scoring margin, and then asked a second question: how did the season end? The two answers rarely point at the same team. The best margin on this list belongs to a team that lost its last game. The one team here that never lost a game, the Dolphins, had the smallest margin of our top four. Our ranking is a judgment call about how to weigh those two things, and we show the numbers so you can weigh them differently.
| Team | Record | Points for-against | Margin per game | How it ended |
|---|
| 1985 Bears | 15-1 | 456-198 | +16.1 | Won Super Bowl XX, 46-10 |
| 2007 Patriots | 16-0 | 589-274 | +19.7 | Lost Super Bowl XLII, 17-14 |
| 1984 49ers | 15-1 | 475-227 | +15.5 | Won Super Bowl XIX, 38-16 |
| 1972 Dolphins | 14-0 | 385-171 | +15.3 | Won Super Bowl VII, 14-7 |
| 2013 Seahawks | 13-3 | 417-231 | +11.6 | Won Super Bowl XLVIII, 43-8 |
Regular-season records and scores from Pro-Football-Reference. The 1972 season was 14 games; the others were 16. Margin per game is points for minus points against, divided by games played.
No. 1
1985 Chicago Bears
15-1 · 18-1 including the playoffs
The Bears led the league in points allowed (198, or 12.4 a game) and finished second in points scored (456, or 28.5 a game). Buddy Ryan's defense, with Richard Dent, Mike Singletary and Dan Hampton at its core, shut out the Giants (21-0) and the Rams (24-0) in the playoffs, and then Super Bowl XX happened: Bears 46, Patriots 10. New England finished with 7 net rushing yards and 123 net yards of total offense, and Chicago sacked its quarterbacks seven times. The 36-point margin is the second-largest in Super Bowl history, behind the 49ers' 55-10 win over Denver in Super Bowl XXIV.
Their one loss came on Monday night, December 2, at Miami, 38-24.
The case against: the passing game. Jim McMahon threw 15 touchdowns and 11 interceptions with an 82.6 rating in 13 games. Walter Payton carried it, with 1,551 rushing yards on 324 carries. We ranked the Bears first because they had the league's best defense, a top-two offense, and the second-largest Super Bowl margin ever. That is a judgment, not a theorem.
No. 2
2007 New England Patriots
16-0 · 18-1 including the playoffs
On pure scoring this is the best team in the group. The Patriots put up 589 points, 33 more than the 1998 Vikings' previous record of 556. Tom Brady threw 50 touchdown passes and 4,806 yards. Randy Moss caught 98 passes for 1,493 yards and 23 touchdowns, passing Jerry Rice's single-season record of 22. Wes Welker added 112 receptions. The defense was good rather than great, fourth in the league at 17.1 points allowed per game.
The scoreboard also shows how thin the margin could be. Three regular-season wins came by exactly three points: 31-28 over Philadelphia, 27-24 at Baltimore and 38-35 at the Giants in the finale. Then came a 31-20 win over Jacksonville, a 21-12 win over San Diego, and a 17-14 loss to the Giants in Super Bowl XLII.
The case against: it is the only team in this group whose last game was a loss, and the offense that scored 589 points managed 14 in that one. We put them second, ahead of the unbeaten Dolphins, because a +19.7 scoring margin over a full 16-game season is a gap no one else here comes close to.
No. 3
1984 San Francisco 49ers
15-1 · 18-1 including the playoffs
Joe Montana threw 28 touchdowns against 10 interceptions, and the offense averaged 29.7 points a game while the defense gave up 14.2, the league's best mark. Wendell Tyler led the team with 1,262 rushing yards, Dwight Clark with 880 receiving yards, and Roger Craig with 71 catches. The only loss came on October 14 to Pittsburgh, 20-17. In the playoffs San Francisco beat the Giants 21-10 and then shut out the Bears 23-0, one year before Chicago's famous season.
Super Bowl XIX was a 38-16 win over Miami. The Dolphins had Dan Marino, who threw 48 touchdown passes and 5,084 yards that year, and San Francisco won by 22.
One correction to a common claim: Roger Craig's 1,000-yard rushing and 1,000-yard receiving season (1,050 and 1,016) came in 1985, not 1984. In 1984 he had 649 rushing and 675 receiving yards.
The case against: the margin is close to the Bears' but the defense was not quite as suffocating. They sit third because they lost only once and beat a Dolphins team whose quarterback had just thrown 48 touchdowns.
No. 4
1972 Miami Dolphins
14-0 · 17-0 including the playoffs
This is the only team in the Super Bowl era to finish a season without a loss or a tie, playoffs included. Miami led the league in both scoring (385 points, 27.5 a game) and defense (171 allowed, 12.2 a game), the "No-Name Defense" under Don Shula. Larry Csonka ran for 1,117 yards and Mercury Morris for 1,000. And the quarterback story is not the one people remember: Bob Griese played only six regular-season games, and Earl Morrall started nine and threw for 1,360 yards and 11 touchdowns.
The playoff run was tighter than the regular season: 20-14 over Cleveland, 21-17 over Pittsburgh, and 14-7 over Washington in Super Bowl VII.
The case for a higher spot: nobody else on this list went unbeaten from opening day to the final whistle. The case against: a 14-game schedule, and three playoff wins by 6, 4 and 7 points. We value the perfection, which is the whole premise of this site, but not above the two teams that dominated by more.
No. 5
2013 Seattle Seahawks
13-3 · 16-3 including the playoffs
Seattle allowed 231 points, the fewest in the NFL that season (14.4 a game). Richard Sherman led the league with 8 interceptions, and the secondary around him included Earl Thomas and Kam Chancellor. The path through the playoffs was 23-15 over New Orleans and 23-17 over San Francisco, the game in which Sherman tipped a pass that Malcolm Smith intercepted.
Super Bowl XLVIII was the statement: 43-8 over a Denver team that had scored 606 points in the regular season behind Peyton Manning's 55 touchdown passes and 5,477 yards. The 35-point margin ties for the third-largest in Super Bowl history.
The case against: a +11.6 margin is the smallest here, and the team lost three regular-season games. We included them because the Super Bowl result against the highest-scoring offense in history is hard to ignore.
Just outside the five
1989 49ers (14-2). They scored 442 points and allowed 253. Montana threw 26 touchdowns against 8 interceptions, and Jerry Rice had 1,483 receiving yards and 17 touchdowns. Super Bowl XXIV was a 55-10 win over Denver, the largest margin in Super Bowl history at 45 points.
1978 Steelers (14-2). They scored 356 and allowed 195. Terry Bradshaw threw 28 touchdowns and Franco Harris ran for 1,082 yards. Super Bowl XIII was a 35-31 win over Dallas, far closer than the Steelers' playoff wins of 33-10 and 34-5.
2015 Panthers (15-1). They led the league with 500 points scored, and Cam Newton produced 35 passing and 10 rushing touchdowns. Carolina beat Seattle 31-24 and Arizona 49-15 before losing Super Bowl 50 to Denver, 24-10.
What the five have in common
Every team here outscored opponents by at least 11 points a game. Three of them still lost at least one regular-season game. The two that went unbeaten in the regular season, the Patriots and the Dolphins, had the narrowest escapes: three Patriots wins by exactly three points, and three Dolphins playoff wins by 6, 4 and 7. Four of the five won the title; the Patriots are the exception. That is the distance between a great season and 17-0: even the best margins in this sample left room for an off afternoon.
In 17-0 you cannot draft a whole franchise, but you can pull its stars out of the spin one at a time. At the time of writing the game's Bears 1980s pool includes Payton, Singletary, Dent, Hampton and McMahon, and its Patriots 2000s pool includes Brady, Moss, Bruschi and Seymour. If you want to see what these teams were made of, start there.
How we checked this
Every record, score, point total and statistic above was checked against Pro-Football-Reference's team-season pages, Super Bowl box scores and league leaderboards. Two judgments are ours alone: the ranking order, and the labels in "The case against" paragraphs.
Corrections to an earlier version of this article:
- Brady's 4,806 yards in 2007 was not a record at the time (Marino threw for 5,084 in 1984), and Jerod Mayo, drafted in 2008, was not on the 2007 team.
- The 1985 Bears' point differential is +258, not +236, and Super Bowl XX was the second-largest margin, not the largest.
- The 1984 49ers averaged 29.7 points per game, and Roger Craig's 1,000/1,000 season was 1985.
- The 49ers' 1989 Super Bowl win was over Denver, not Cincinnati.
- The 2013 Seahawks did not allow the fewest points in a 16-game season (the 2000 Ravens allowed 165), and an unsupported passer-rating claim about their defense has been removed.
- Bob Griese missed most of the 1972 regular season.