Dynasty Rankings Update 2024

The Kansas City Chiefs were already a dynasty. But now they’re a Dynasty, capital-D, all rights reserved.

After the NFL’s 100th season in 2019, I went back on our old website and attempted to systematically rank every dynasty in the history of the league, casting a wide net to attempt to catch any sustained period of success. Rather than stick to traditional definitions of “winning X titles in Y years,” we gave teams points based on championships, deep playoff runs, and successful regular seasons, and then added in DVOA to help differential between teams with similar on-field resumes. The article explaining the exact methodology can still be dug up with a little internet sleuthing – and yes, we’ll have to do something about that one of these days – but the general point is that we have a system for both defining what a dynasty is and just how good each dynasty was.

This was 2019, as the Andy Reid had finally won his first Super Bowl, leading the Chiefs to victory over the 49ers. It was cathartic, taking Reid out of the Marty Schottenheimer category of ‘coaches who can’t win the big one’, and preempting years of grouping Patrick Mahomes with Dan Marino in tedious internet arguments about whether or not you need to win a ring in order to be considered a legend. It wasn’t quite the scrappy underdogs finally getting things together, but it was more of a feel-good win than anything else, and a welcome change of pace after the Patriots had appeared in four of the preceding five Super Bowls. Join that up with the loss in the AFC Championship the year prior, as well as several playoff runs with the Alex Smith version of Kansas City, and the 2015-2019 Chiefs ended up ranking as the No. 33 dynasty of all time.

That could have been it. It could have just been a tightly compacted run of high-quality play with a title to serve as the crowning jewel, sort of like the Joe Flacco Ravens. There were worlds in which the team was unable to stay as contenders behind the looming huge Mahomes contract and fade back closer to the pack. A memorable run, and one worth documenting, but only a dynasty if you cast a very wide net.

Well, it’s now 2024, and we no longer need a crystal ball to know how the Chiefs proceeded. Since that original dynasty list, the Chiefs have won two more Super Bowls, appeared in a third, and reached the AFC Championship in a fourth. And while 2023 may have been their least-dominant Super Bowl season – an 11-6 record and “just” a 17.9% DVOA in the regular season places them firmly in the lower third of Super Bowl champs – the sheer accumulated mass of trophies and accolades over the past three seasons have shot the Chiefs up the leaderboards.

With the last three years in the books, the Chiefs are now the 10th-greatest dynasty in the history of the NFL.

The Chiefs knock off the 1991-1996 Dallas Cowboys to take that 10th slot. Dallas was the better team in terms of DVOA – they averaged 26.3% to Kansas City’s 21.6% — but their run was also significantly shorter. They didn’t have a gradual fall from grace. Instead, they didn’t win a single playoff game between 1997 and 2009, while the Chiefs have just kept on rolling. Kansas City has appeared in more Super Bowls and won their division more frequently, and have just racked up more wins throughout their near decade of contention than Dallas was able to before they Switzered themselves apart. I don’t think it’s significantly controversial to say that this current Chiefs team has been more impressive than the brightly-burning but short-lived Triplet Cowboys era.

We have the same question now as we did three years ago, however – where do the Chiefs go from here? It gets a lot harder to climb through the teams in the top 10 of the dynasty rankings than it was to claw through the 20s and 30s; these are the creme de la creme. We can’t say for sure how the future Chiefs will score because DVOA and record are part of the criteria, not just Super Bowl wins, but we can do a little bit of projecting anyway.

Completing the threepeat next season would almost assuredly jump the Chiefs over the Lombardi-era Packers. Comparing pre-war football to the modern NFL is next to impossible, and estimating DVOA for a team that was inventing route trees with Don Hutson is a shot in the dark. But those Packers, as great as they were, often ran into the Bears of their era, while the Chiefs have topped their rivals more often than not. Even just an AFC Championship win would likely slide the Chiefs up one more slot.

If they have a year more like 2022 than 2023 – one where they catch the ball on a regular basis and go through the regular season with the best offense in the league – then the threepeat would likely have them jump the Raiders, as well. Oakland remains the best team with only one title, as playing in the 1970s when giants ruled the earth made even reaching the Super Bowl a herculean task. At a certain point, though, having just one trophy is too much of a hurdle to overcome, and the Chiefs’ crowded trophy room just would become too much to ignore.

Climbing any higher, however, would have to be a multi-year process. To be an all-time great dynasty, you really need about a decade of success, and to get that for Kansas City, you have to tack on the Alex Smith years; Mahomes just has not been around as long as a Brady or a Montana or Starr yet. And those Chiefs teams were good, but they weren’t all-time dynasty great, and so the Chiefs’ average DVOA is lower than most of the other teams on this list. That’s slowly improving as more and more of the run becomes Mahomes-focused, and the Smith years are perfectly adequate filler, but the Chiefs didn’t really become dynasty-worthy until they began running out the best quarterback in football. The Chiefs average a 24.1% DVOA in Mahomes’ seasons but a 16.7% DVOA in Smith’s seasons. The Chiefs just need a little more meat on their bones if they want to sit at the cool kids’ table with the Steel Curtain and Titletown and whatnot. 

And while that seems inevitable at the moment, things can change in a hurry. Even if Mahomes remains Mahomes, there are questions going forward with Kansas City, with both Chris Jones and L’Jarius Sneed entering free agency this year. The expectation is and should be that the Chiefs will be contenders yet again next season, but we have seen teams fall apart even with continued great quarterback play. That’s the story of the New Orleans Saints, who went through a fallow period even with Drew Brees there the entire time. Nothing in the future is guaranteed, and the Chiefs may peak as “only” the 10th-greatest dynasty in NFL history. Give me a moment while I play the world’s smallest violin.

But as long as Kansas City is trotting out Mahomes and Reid, you like them to continue contending year in and year out. Even if they never win another Super Bowl, they may continue to rise on this list as they make deep playoff run after deep playoff run. And they’ll continue to break hearts across the league while they’re doing it.

Which brings us to the other team from Sunday, as well as the wreckage the Chiefs left in their wake this postseason.

In 2022, we ran “Dynasties of Heartbreak” – the teams that came closest to winning a title, but kept coming up just short. Playoff losses, great regular seasons and spectacular DVOAs without a trophy to back them up, in other words. And with the Chiefs hogging all the trophies, there’s a lot of room for pain in recent years.

The Chiefs knocked off the Buffalo Bills, Baltimore Ravens and San Francisco 49ers on their way to the title, and all three have climbed high onto the heartbreak rankings. The Ravens and Bills have moved into the top 20, as repeated postseason failures begin to pile up. They’re joining teams like the 2000s Chargers or 1990s Chiefs as teams that were consistently good, year-in and year-out, but couldn’t quite find their way past the top squads in their conference. It’s hard to rise much higher without a Super Bowl loss on your resume, but Buffalo and Baltimore are joining a long and proud list of second fiddles, at least for now.

The 49ers, on the other hand, have now cracked the top 10. You get more heartbreak points for advancing further in the playoffs, and more heartbreak points for losing close games rather than blowouts. Well, you don’t get much closer than having a lead in overtime in the Super Bowl and still losing. San Francisco joins the 1990 Bills and 2016 Falcons as the only teams in the Super Bowl era to earn the maximum possible 200 points of playoff heartbreak in a single year. Add in the 2019 Super Bowl loss, and the 49ers have 469.2 points of playoff heartbreak alone, before even considering their high DVOAs and solid regular-season records. Add in their 39.4% DVOA and 12-5 record, and the 49ers end up with 320 heartbreak points from 2023 alone – the most painful season in franchise history, and the fourth-most painful season of the Super Bowl era.

Some of this pain will be retroactively cooled if Kyle Shanahan and the 49ers do eventually win a title – and preseason odds for 2024 have installed them as the favorites – but for now, at least, the wounds still fester. Two Super Bowl losses in five years is about as much pain as one fandom can absorb.

The Cowboys aren’t putting up big heartbreak points in any given season, but they keep plugging away, year after year, with successful regular seasons and bupkis in the playoffs. Two decades of Dallas football with nothing to show for it. You can replace Tony Romo with Dak Prescott, Jason Garrett with Mike McCarthy, and it doesn’t matter. The Cowboys, for now at least, remain the top active heartbreak team in the league.