As of today, 22 teams have looked either, good, solid or decent.  They play well enough to think “Yeah, I could see them making a run and getting into the playoffs.”  The Colts, Saints, Broncos and Vikings are undefeated and playing really stellar football.  They’ve all been tested and won tough contest against quality opponents.  The other 18 have all shown flashes of promise and are entertaining to watch week in and week out.

The remaining 10 teams are an embarrassment to football, the NFL and sports in general.  Those teams are:

• Oakland
• Detroit
• Carolina
• Buffalo
• Cleveland
• Kansas City
• Tampa Bay
• Tennessee
• St. Louis
• Washington

They don’t deserve to play the rest of the season.  Of those 10 teams, they have won a combined 11 times.  Only 2 of those times have against teams in the top 22 (Oakland vs. Philly & Buffalo vs the Jets).  Cleveland’s lone win was a 6-3 thrill fest against Buffalo. There are three winless teams.  Tennessee suffered the worst NFL loss in 30 years.  Half of the games every week are decided before kickoff or are Washington-Detroit-esque slapfights.

It would be easy to just 86 the lot of them.  There would be no more “Oh God, do I have to watch Oakland-Detroit this week?”  (The Gods were merciful in blacking out that game regionally in Detroit.)  But there’s a lot of players on those teams who really deserve to be on a winner and it wouldn’t be fair to just dump them out of the league because the management of their respective teams shouldn’t be allowed to control a Madden 2010 team, much less a real NFL team.

Well maybe not a LOT of players, but maybe enough to field a team.  So, here’s what I propose:

• Remove the above teams.
• Take the best players from those teams and combine them into a new team.  The Las Vegas Zoo.

Bill Simmons has been pleading for a pro team in Vegas for some time now and we all win when he’s happy.  Why name them “The Zoo”?  Other than the fact that its awesome?  We need to offer some concession to those teams being dismissed.  We need to honor their history and mascots.  You have 5 teams with animal mascots (if you count Cleveland Dog Pound instead of the bland “Browns”), you have 2 teams represented by pirates (Buccaneers & Raiders), 2 teams represented by Indians (Chiefs & Redskins) and the ironically named Titans.  You can has a logo of all of the mascots of the redacted teams in cages on a pirate ship being watched by the indigenous people of America.  And we just ignore the Titan part of it.  They lost their right to be represented after letting Brian Hoyer score a rushing touchdown against them.  Yeah, there’s a reason you don’t know who Hoyer is.  Everyone is happy.  But now for the fun part:  Fielding the team (after the jump):

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