It seems doctors and their ilk are on a 24x7 news cycle these days.

 

Between the sudden harvest of dead celebrities – today we find that TV pitchman Billy Mays won’t be down for breakfast – the guvment’s trillion-dollar effort to play medicine man, and the doctor of crazology just “re-elected” in Iran, there’s no shortage of MEs, MDs and Ph.Ds chattering on the tube.

 

Of course, you can always trust your friendly neighborhood Ph.P – Professor of Pigskin – called the Cold, Hard Football Facts to knock on the door of each NFL team with the most astute medical analysis, no matter how painful. We give it to you the same way we take our whiskey before performing a complex medical operation: straight.

 

Here, for example, is our look at the most sickly units from 2008 and our prognosis for their ability to improve here in 2009.

 

The diagnosis: You know your passing game is dysfunctional when the Lions – the 0-16 Lions! – average a full 1 yard per attempt more than you do.

 

That’s right. The 2008 Bengals (4.27 YPA) were outclassed by the 2008 Lions (5.28 YPA) when it came time to move the ball through the air.

 

The Bengals dropped back to pass 564 times last year – and you have to wonder why.

 

Fifty-one of those 564 drop-backs resulted in sacks, while the team netted just 2,406 yards on those plays. That was about seven games worth of work for Drew Brees last year.

 

How bad was it for the Bungles? Consider this: 11 teams last year averaged more yards per rush attempt than Cincy averaged per dropback. (The Bungles, for their part, averaged just 3.62 YPA on the ground last year, 30th in the NFL ... so know you know the answer to "why?" they bothered attempting to pass so often.)

 

Don’t blame the inexperienced Ryan Fitzpatrick for the team’s passing woes. Carson Palmer was not the least bit effective in his four appearances last year, either. He averaged just 4.74 YPA (using our sack-adjusted formula) on his 140 dropbacks.

 

Seattle fans are high on their team's acquisition for former Bengals wideout T.J. Houshmandzadeh. But the fact that he and Chad Ochocinco were a part of the most abysmal passing attack in football last year speaks volumes about the general inability of wide receivers to impact a pro football team unless a lot of other pieces are already in place.

 

The prognosis: To quote the great Howard Jones, "things can only get better ... Wo-oh-oh-oh-oh-oh-ohohhhh." As we noted before and after the draft, the Bengals need to rebuild their offensive line before they can become a legitimate NFL passing attack. After all, you could have Dan Marino under center and Jerry Rice and Don Hutson at wideout, and it won't matter if you can't protect the passer ... and Cincy couldn't protect the passer in 2008, as evidenced by their No. 31 ranking on our Offensive Hog Index. However, the Bengals have made several off-season moves to improve the offensive line, starting with top pick, LT Andre Smith. And, believe it or not, Cincy  enters the 2009 season on a roll: they were a hard-to-believe 4-3-1 over the second half of the 2008 season, after a dreadful 0-8 start.

 

 

 

 

The diagnosis: For a team that boasted a high-profile coach (Mike Shanahan) and fair amount of big-name stars on both sides of the ball – receiver Brandon Marshall, quarterback Jay Cutler, DB Dre Bly and the Bailey Bros. – the 2008 Broncos showed a remarkable inability to make game-breaking plays.

 

In fact, the Broncos produced just 28 Big Plays all last year according to our Big Play Index. Only the stone-footed Jaguars were worse (27). Hell, even the 0-16 Lions produced 36 Big Plays. The Broncos were easily the worst in football last year with a -32 Big Play differential, after giving up 60 Big Plays themselves.

 

This inability to make those game-changing plays that often prove the difference between victory and defeat was a major reason why a team that moved the ball up and down the field almost effortlessly on offense scored a mere 370 points and why they went just 8-8 despite what seemed like a relatively promising team. The Broncos defense, for example, hauled in just 6 picks – and CHFF readers are fully aware that teams that make interceptions win games and those that don’t make interceptions don’t win games. 

 

The diagnosis: Vital signs are good. The Broncos have made plenty of bold and necessary moves since the end of the 2008 seasoon. In fact, they decided organizationally to cut away all the dead weight as it it were a sort of gridiron gangrene – starting at the very top. Shanahan is gone after a great run, and in his place is the baby-faced Josh McDaniels, who was the coordinator behind the most prolific offensive in NFL history (2007 Patriots). On the field, Bly is gone. Boss Bailey is gone. Cutler is gone. Marshall is unhappy and could be gone. Kyle Orton will be under center and, though he's not known as a game-breaker, he doesn't make mistakes and he should help improve the team's offensive efficiency. He’ll also be handing off to a potentially explosive new running back, rookie Knowshon Moreno, who has a human highlight film at Georgia. A slew of highly touted defensive draft picks should improve playmaking ability on that side of the ball, too.

 

The diagnosis: The Chiefs quite literally could not have been worse on the defensive front last year. In fact, at one point in the season they nearly hit for the cycle: they were dead last in the overall Defensive Hog indicator, as well as dead last in the three components that make up the indicator (rushing yards per attempt allowed, negative pass plays forced and third-down success). We had never seen one team bottom out in every part of the indicator.

 

By the time all the dust had settled on the 208 season, the Chiefs had avoided a complete historic disaster and were 31st in rushing YPA allowed and 31st in third-down success, though 32nd in negative pass plays and, of course, an unhealthy 32nd overall.

 

It's amazing what the loss of a single player, Jared Allen, meant to the team. The Chiefs, after all, ranked a very, very good No. 5 on the Defensive Hog Index in 2007, the last year with Allen in the line-up. The literally dropped off the face of the earth defensively when Allen shipped off to Minnesota.

 

Prognosis for improvement: Very good. New England Midwest has made bold, aggressive efforts to improve the defensive hogs. Most notably, devoting their top two picks in the April draft to defensive linemen Tyson Jackson (No. 3 overall) and Alex Magee.

 

The diagnosis: If any unit in NFL history should have been slapped with a “do not resuscitate order” it was the pass defense of the 2008 Lions.

 

We discussed this problem a number of times last year. Detroit’s was not only the worst pass defense of 2008, it was the worst pass defense in NFL history – surrendering a record 110.8 Defensive Passer Rating. And the performance came on the heels of a 2007 campaign in which the Lions were the first pass defense in history to allow opponents to complete more than 70 percent of their pass attempts over the course of an entire season.

 

Even a first-year student of pigskinology can look at those charts and realize the trends in Detroit are not promising.

 

In addition to its record-bad Defensive Passer Rating, Detroit was dead last in 2008 in the gruesome average it surrendered on each pass attempt (8.79) yards, while it’s TD to INT ratio all but flat-lined. The Lions allowed 25 TD passes, while intercepting just 4 passes all year. Think about that – opponents attempted 444 passes last year, and the Lions got their hands on less than 1 percent of those attempts.

 

Prognosis for improvement: Slim to none. Taking Matt Stafford with the No. 1 pick was a bad move for a team that has so many other needs. Even under new leadership, it looks like the Same Old Lions. They’ve made only tepid efforts to improve the worst pass defense in history at a time when they need major reconstructive surgery.

 

The diagnosis: Sure, Detroit made history with its porous pass defense that led directly to the first 0-16 season in NFL history.

 

But there’s an argument to be made that the 2-14 Rams were actually worse. The Rams finished dead last in 2008 in our Relativity Index – they were, on average 14.7 PPG worse than the average performance of their opponents. The Lions, meanwhile, were 31st on the indicator at -14.4 PPG.

 

So it was a tight, two-man race for the bottom. Even the 30th-ranked Chiefs easily outpaced the dreadful Rams and Lions: they were a mere 9.1 PPG worse than their opponents.

 

If not for the two stunning wins over Washington and Dallas that marked the start of the Jim Haslett Era in St. Louis, we might have had two 0-16 teams last year and the debate over “worst of all time” might have really been interesting.

 

The prognosis: There are signs of life. The Haslett Era which began with such promise ended with such disaster: a 10-game losing streak to close out the season. Good-bye, Jim. Enter Steve Spagnulo, the former Giants defensive coordinator with a great claim to fame: his defense engineered arguably the greatest upset performance in history during New York's 17-14 win over New England in Super Bowl XLII. You have to believe his leadership will be enough to, at the very least, improve a dreadful defense that surrendered 465 points last year despite a schedule that included an abudance of woeful offensive teams.