While the NFC East appears to have hit a bit of a bump in the road, there is absolutely no way that it is the worst division in football. Three of the four teams in the division are all contenders for the division title as well as the wildcard, and even the fourth team, Washington, has played competitive football as of late.

There's no doubt in my mind that the AFC West, AFC East, and NFC West are all worse than the NFC East, and you could even make an argument for the NFC North and NFC South. The only two divisions that are without a doubt better than the NFC East are the AFC North and AFC South divisions. While it appears that the NFC East has fallen off in recent years, it is still among the top divisions in football.

I apologize to the reader if it's become my meme on this fine site to challenge the editors with their questions. But this one makes no sense.

Let's check the results from Sunday's games (checking the results from Sunday's games)...Eagles 24-Bears 20. Giants 34-Falcons 31 (OT). Dallas 7-Washington 6.

That's 3-1 for a division and the only loss came from another division team. How in any way is that futile?

I know the Cowboys don't look like a 7-3 team right now after their last two games, but they are. The Cowboys have the same record as the New England Patriots, who nobody is calling the worst team in football these days. They also have the same record as the Arizona Cardinals, San Diego Chargers or the Cincinnati Bengals who, like the Eagles, lost to the Raiders this year.

In fact, if you look at the NFC East, it's one of two divisions in football that boasts three teams with winning records. And the division's worst team -- the Redskins -- has more wins than four of the other division cellar-dwellers. And then there's this of the eight NFL divisions, the aggregate record of each is:

AFC East - 19-21
AFC North - 19-21
AFC South - 24-14 (will be 25-15 after tonight's game)
AFC West - 19-21

NFC East 22-18
NFC North - 21-19
NFC South - 20-20
NFC West 15-25

The East is not only the best division in the NFC, going by the records, but it's the second best division in all of football, better from top to bottom than divisions that boast the likes of the Saints or Patriots or Steelers or Vikings. And if you look at the numbers, sure we expected Arizona to win the division, but the rest of the NFC West is way below mediocre. It's downright awful.

Three teams in the NFC West have minus net points, including the Rams who have -157 net points in ten games - while the NFC East is one of just two divisions, along with the AFC North, to have three teams with a plus net points. Add the fact that the Redskins are just -32 on the season (which is actually better than 11 other teams in the league) compared to the Browns who have -148 net points and you can say that the NFC East is clearly the most balanced division.

Just for good measure let's add in the fact that the Cowboys are 5-2 outside their division, the Eagles and Giants are 4-3 outside their division, and while the Redskins have looked terrible at times this season, they are 3-4 outside the division, with all their wins coming from non NFC East opponents.

Worst division? Hardly. And while the teams haven't been playing well as of late, the numbers clearly indicate the NFC East is one of the best.

The Cowboys and Redskins may have resurrected the true meaning of offensive with their futility scoring points this weekend, but the Eagles and Giants each bounced back with impressive victories yesterday. All in all, the division was 3-1 yesterday with a combined record of 22-18.

On the opposite coast, the NFC West has an overall record of 15-25, the league's worst.
The Cardinals beat the Rams, but both the Seahawks and 49ers lost, so this division was 1-3 last weekend.

I understand the local sentiment regarding the weak play currently in the NFC East, but looking broader, this division isn't so much bad as it is very evenly matched. No team has such a talent advantage that the division can be dominated -- unlike the NFC West, where the Cardinals, winners of three in a row, are running away with the crown.

In reality, is there any question that any team in the NFC East would beat the Rams, Seahawks or Rams on a neutral field?

Unrealistic expectations have doomed one of the best divisions in the NFL to disappointment, almost regardless of the outcome of the season.

Big media markets, past successes and larger-than-life personalities have made the NFC East -- the Cowboys, Eagles, Giants and Redskins -- an easy target for scrutiny and criticism, whereas other divisions -- the NFC West, for example -- have no such burdens. Every time Dallas or Philly loses, it's America's Team failing to honor its own legacy, or it's McNabb and Reid choking again. But if St. Louis or Seattle drops a game or three, it's simply the Rams or Seahawks doing what they do.

Coming into the 2009 season, many believed the NFC East to be one of the NFL's top divisions, and after 11 weeks, the numbers bear that out despite the lack of any dominant team.
Only the AFC South -- led by the undefeated Colts -- has a better record in non-division games than the NFC East. Indy and company is 17-6 against the rest of the league, and the NFC East is 16-12. Every other division is within a game or two of .500, with the exception of the NFC West, which is a shocking 8-18 in non-division games.

Numbers aren't everything, of course, but it's hard to find an angle from which the NFC East doesn't look pretty good.

The division lacks one of those truly bad teams -- Detroit, Kansas City, Tampa, St. Louis, Cleveland, Oakland, maybe even Buffalo. Washington is 3-7, but the Redskins' physically imposing defense makes them a punishing opponent, evidenced by their 3-4 record outside the division.

With Dallas, Philly and the Giants all at 6-4 or better, the NFC East has the best chance of all the divisions of sending three teams to the playoffs. In fact, if the season were to end today, the two NFC wild cards would be Philadelphia and Green Bay, with New York losing out on a tiebreaker.

Fans of the Cowboys, Eagles, Giants and Redskins all wake up each September with Super Bowl hopes, if not expectations. That's certainly nothing to discourage, but we shouldn't be surprised when, come December, those hopes have taken a beating.

I think it would be a pretty hard argument to make that the NFC East is the worst division in football. It certainly isn't the best like it maybe was in years passed, but the simple fact is that three of the four teams are at least two games over .500. Only one other division in the league has three teams over .500.

Looking at that fact, top to bottom you'd have to say the NFC East is still among the best. What the division doesn't have, which it has in the past, is a real dominant team. The Eagles, Giants, & Cowboys are all above average teams but none are dominant. So does that mean the NFC South who has one great team and a bunch of bad or mediocre teams is a better overall division? I suppose that's a matter of opinion. I don't think it's a matter of opinion whether the NFC East is the worst division in football. It's not. As of right now I believe the NFC East would be sending three teams to the playoffs.

The worst division in football this year is the same one it's been for several years. The NFC West.

I have to admit, when I was first asked whether the NFC East is now the worst division in football, I thought it was a typo.

Am I missing something? The NFC East has the second best combined division record, only to the AFC South. They also have three of the best six teams in the NFC.

The question seemed even more perplexing since the NFL has had a clear-cut, by far the worst division in the NFC West. The NFC West is coming off a 2008 campaign, where their division winner went 9-7. In fact, the winner of the NFC West hasn't won more than 10 games since 2005. This year, 7-9 would probably do the job to win that division.

To bury this argument, the NFC West has been outscored by their opponents by a jarring 143 points!

The NFC East (one of the strongest divisions in the entire league) has no business being in this discussion.

In sorting divisions by DVOA (Defense-adjusted Value Over Average), Football Outsiders' primary efficiency statistic, it's pretty evident that the two Western divisions provide the worst overall football. From best to worst, here's how it looks through 10 weeks -- since this is being written on Sunday night, we don't yet have stats for Week 11, though these percentages will closely estimate those results.

NFC East: 54.80%

The NFC Beast is on top, thanks to the Eagles 30.4% and Dallas' 21.1%. Washington is the only team with a negative total DVOA (-6.50), which probably comes as no surprise.

AFC South: 33.70%

The Colts are on top here with a DVOA of 34.50%, second-best in the NFL. The Texans and Jaguars have single-digit DVOA, whole the Titans have a -12.7% DVOA that is the byproduct if starting the season with six straight losses.

AFC East: 29.30%

The Pats lost to the Colts on that fateful Sunday Night game, but they still have the league's best DVOA (39.8%) because they're a bit better on offense and decidedly better on special teams. The Dolphins and Jets are hanging behind, but the Bills are way down there at -22.0%.

AFC North: 24.70%

To rank fourth with three teams in the top eleven, this division must have a real mutt at the bottom. And they do -- Eric Mangini's Cleveland Browns rank 30th at -42.7%, which is why they might not be Eric Mangini's Browns much longer.

NFC South: -6.80%

The third-ranked Saints (30.4%) are this division's only elite team, with the Falcons close to league average, the Panthers falling below the bar, and the Buccaneers in freefall at -32.8%.

NFC North: -27.20%

This is pretty much Minnesota and everyone else record-wise, though the Packers have a nice 20.3% DVOA to Minnesota's 25.0%. The Bears have let their 27th-ranked offense drag them down to -17.8, but it's Detroit's league-worst -54.7% DVOA that really pulls this division down.

NFC West: -29.30%

The NFC West has long been a division in which one team stands high above a group of non-starters. Last season, that top spot changed from the Seahawks to the Cardinals, and Arizona's still on top this year with the division's only positive DVOA at 19.6%. As expected, the Rams are at the bottom here at -37.5%.

AFC West: -62.70%

The worst division by far, and that's not the fault of the Broncos (13.2%) or Chargers (5.3%). You'd have to place the blame at the feet of the Chiefs (-32.1%) and Raiders (-49.1%).

The perennial beast now finds itself mired in mediocrity, but is it really the worst division in the NFL? Vote here...

My first reaction when this question was posed to me was "Are you kidding?''

It's also my second, third and fourth reaction.

No, the NFC East is not the worst division in the NFL. Not even close.

Then I remembered I was dealing with Washington, where everything is magnified. Not just football. Everything. And the Redskins and Cowboys had played a stinker of a game Sunday, the Cowboys somehow muddling through 7-6. Not nearly as exciting or as good a game as the one played by the Lions and Browns, won by Detroit 38-37 on the last play.

Does someone want to suggest that either of those teams is better than anyone in the NFC East? Yeah, I know. Until Sunday, Detroit's only other win was over the Redskins.

That kind of makes my point. I hate NFL slogans, but the one coined 50 or so years ago, "on any given Sunday,'' is sometimes true. Heck, the Chiefs beat the Steelers on Sunday and the Raiders beat the Bengals, but I don't think that makes the AFC West -- my candidate for the NFL's worst division -- any better over 16 games. In fact, if we follow that reasoning, maybe the AFC North is the worst -- all four of its teams lost.

The NFC East?

It was the best division the last two years and expected to be the best division this season. Now the top three teams are having problems, none of them insoluble -- in fact, the division was 3-1 on Sunday with the only loss the Redskins to the Cowboys. A division game.

Oh well. It's the era of instant communications -- see questions like this on Twitter every day. Every week seems to be its own season. No past or no future. So Dallas and Washington stumble and we have a question to write about.

In the end? My experience tells me the Giants, Eagles and Cowboys are 9-7, 10-6 teams. Someone might be better -- the Giants were pretty average two years ago and look what happened in the playoffs.
In any case, divisions don't win championships. Teams do.

The NFC East the worst division in football? I never even thought it was possible we would be debating THAT this season.

This, though, is why all those pre-season predictions and all that are just a bunch of nonsense meant to fill TV air time and space on blogs, Web sites and newspapers. Nobody has a clue what is going to happen until the games are actually played.

More directly to the topic at hand, though, I am not buying for a second the theory that the NFC East is the worst division in football.

There is little doubt the NFC East teams have not been as good as advertised. The Giants have struggled at times. The Eagles have been inconsistent, and suffered the indignity of losing to the Raiders. The Cowboys suddenly seem like a team that has forgotten how to play offense. The Dan Snyders, umm, I mean the Redskins? They are a joke. How they have three wins I have no clue.

All of that said, there are still three good teams in the NFC East.

There are other divisions with two bad ones. I would put the NFC West (Seahawks and Rams), and AFC West (Chiefs -- despite beating Pittsburgh, and Oakland - despite beating Cincinnati) in that category. Maybe even the NFC South (Carolina, Tampa Bay).

So, I will give you that the NFC East has hardly been the beast prognosticators thought it might be. But, no way is it the worst division in football.

At the beginning of the season I would have said the NFC East is toughest division in the NFL. 11 weeks into 2009 and it seems like this perennial powerhouse has tumbled into the outhouse.

But is it the worst? Unlike most divisions, the NFC East doesn't have a domination team -- a serious Super Bowl contender. No Minnesota, no New England, no Indianapolis, no New Orleans, no Cincinnati (I know they just lost to Oakland but I still put them in that category). In my estimation, you can't be the worst division in football and have a team of that caliber. So, disqualifying them leaves us with the AFC West, the NFC West and the NFC East.

With Kansas City and Oakland, it's tempting to pick the AFC West. That is until yesterday, when they defeated the defending Super Bowl champs and the Bengals respectively. Any given Sunday syndrome aside, San Diego has really picked things up of late, winning five games straight. The Chargers are so good in fact, that I'm almost inclined to put them in the basket of the serious Super Bowl contenders. The AFC West isn't great, but there isn't a team in the NFC East that I would pick over San Diego.

Staying out west, Seattle, San Francisco, Arizona and St. Louis are the definition of blah. The NFC West is so bad it seems to fly under the radar. Unlike the NFC East, the West has been perennially retched for what feels like forever. This season is no different. The 15 total wins puts it at the bottom of the league, and it also remains the only division with just one team at or above.500. While there are no great teams in the NFC East, there are three average ones and the Redskins. The NFC West has only one average team, the Cardinals, and three Washington Redskins. And am I alone in thinking that the only reason Arizona will make the playoffs is because someone in that division has to?

Both NFC East and West are playing uninspiring football thus far, but if the East's play is more disappointing it is also slightly stronger. To put it another way, the NFC East is so bad that if we had a competition for the worst division in football it would come in second.