The Redskins are worse on ‘Monday Night Football’ than anyone is at anything

The Washington Redskins fell at home to the Carolina Panthers on Monday night, giving the team its 16th loss in its last 17 MNF games at FedEx Field, a stretch that includes the entire Dan Snyder era. How bad is that 1-16 record? Oh, it's bad. It's so, so bad -- worse than anything else any NFL team has going (or maybe has ever had).

"But wait," you say. The Browns are 0-14 en route to 0-16. The Lions once went winless. Teams are horrible every year. That's true, but being pathetic for one season (or, in the Browns case, a lot of seasons) is an understandable phenomenon. Losing begets losing from week to week and season to season. Every team has ebbs and flows.

What makes the Redskins' situation so different is that the team has five playoff appearances over that stretch (and could get a sixth) and, while hardly a juggernaut, possesses a 129-154-1 record (.456) in non-Monday night home games. Throw in that 1-16 record (.059) and the Redskins are seven times better overall than they are in these Monday night home games. Being bad is one thing -- being so exceptionally bad in one type of game over nearly two decades while being perfectly mediocre in all the others is a statistical outlier the likes of which sports hasn't seen since that year Brady Anderson hit 50 home runs. 

Only one team has more home losses in the history of MNF than the Redskins have since 1998. (The Dolphins are 33-22 overall at home.) Other teams are close -- the Cowboys, Saints and Rams all have 16 losses, too, but none surpasses Washington. And remember, thie Redskins' streak is 18 years old. MNF turned 45 this year.

Since 1998, double the home MNF losses of every team in the NFL. Even then no one passes the 'Skins.

And we're not talking about bad luck here. Six of the losses were by one score (and two of those were garbage-time aided). The Redskins have losses of 35, 33, 31, 30, 22 and 21 points in six other games, and that 31-point game, a 2010 divisional battle with Philly, was closer than it appeared: The Redskins were actually down 35-0 just 16 minutes into the game before meaninglessly outscoring the Eagles 28-24 in the next three quarters.

Forget Monday night. If you expand the search to all primetime games -- Thursday, Saturday, Sunday, that time the Eagles played on a Tuesday -- only two teams have more home losses in any night game than the Redskins do on a Monday. The Cowboys are 18-18 in primetime since '98, and the Eagles are 17-17. But, of course, the Redskins still top the list of the most primetime home losses since '98, with a stellar 8-25 record. That's 1-16 on Monday night, 5-6 on Sunday night, 2-1 on Thursday and 0-2 on Saturday.

Prior to this current slide (is it really a slide if it last 18 years? -- that's more like an era), the Redskins were 16-5 at home on MNF dating back to the game's creation, which was tied for the best mark in the NFL with the Pittsburgh Steelers. Since then, though, the Steelers are 10-0 at home and on a 16-game win streak dating back to 1992. The Redskins, somehow, are still seventh on the all-time wins list for MNF home games with 17. 

Since 1998, Cleveland has one MNF win in four games. Buffalo has one in three. The Jaguars -- the Jaguars -- are 6-4 in home Monday nighters over the same stretch! And then there's the 1-16 Redskins, winning percentage of 0.059, which is four times lower than the 31st-ranked MNF home team, the 1-3 Browns. Way to go Cleveland -- someone is way crappier than you in a football-related pursuit.

There are eight NFL franchises that haven't played more than 16 MNF home games -- and four of those teams have been around since before 1982 (the other four were expansion or relocated franchises from the past 20 years).

The Washington Post notes that the odds of the Redskins going 1-16 in those 17 games (based on the pregame point spreads) was 551,000 to 1, numbers that resemble Monday night's Panthers vs. Skins rushing totals.

In case you were wondering, the Redskins are 4-3 in MNF road games over the same time period, which is less fascinating for the better record (it'd take Einstein to come up with an equation that says a team could be worse than 1-16 over an 18-year stretch) than for the fact that the franchise has played 10 more MNF home games than road games since 1998. Meanwhile, the Giants have played just eight home Monday nighters compared to 19 on the road. (The overarching lesson here: The NFC East plays a lot of primetime games.)

Tom Brady has 16 losses in 116 home starts. The Redskins have 16 losses in their last 17 Monday night home starts. 

Kirk Cousins has a touchdown pass in 27 of his last 29 games. The only two games in which he failed: on Monday and all the way back in Week 1, when the 'Skins lost to the Steelers ... on a Monday night.