The 10 Worst Monday Night Blowouts Since 2010

Since 2010 there have been 282 Monday Night Football games. The worst of them was New England 45, the New York Jets 3, in December 2010 — a 42-point margin that's still the largest on Monday night in the last sixteen seasons. Six weeks later the Jets went back to the same stadium and knocked the Patriots out of the playoffs.

Here are the ten worst.

The list

#	Margin	Season	Game
1	42	2010, Wk 13	Patriots 45, Jets 3
2	39	2019, Wk 12	Ravens 45, Rams 6
3	38	2011, Wk 10	Packers 45, Vikings 7
4	37	2024, Wk 3	Bills 47, Jaguars 10
5	35	2014, Wk 12	Bills 38, Jets 3
6	34	2022, Wk 2	Bills 41, Titans 7
7	34	2024, Wk 16	Packers 34, Saints 0
8	33	2019, Wk 7	Patriots 33, Jets 0
9	31	2018, Wk 1	Jets 48, Lions 17
10	31	2010, Wk 10	Eagles 59, Redskins 28

Ranks 9 and 10 are two of five games tied at 31 points — Patriots–Chiefs (2011), Ravens–Bengals (2012), and Colts–Jets (2016) sit just outside the list on the same margin.

Three of the top ten involve the Jets losing. A fourth involves the Jets winning by 31, which is its own kind of statement about the era.

The worst of the worst

Patriots 45, Jets 3 (2010). The benchmark, and the one with the best ending.

This wasn't a mismatch on paper — New England was 9–2, the Jets were 9–2, and it was billed all week as a fight for the AFC East. Then the Patriots scored on their first four possessions, the Jets threw interceptions on three straight drives to open the second half, and Rex Ryan spent the postgame taking the blame in public: he said he'd never had his team prepared the way it should have been.

Six weeks later, the two met again at the same stadium in the divisional round. New England had finished 14–2 and was the AFC's top seed. The Jets won 28–21, and Braylon Edwards admitted afterward that the 45–3 had been on their minds the whole night.

The worst Monday night blowout of the last sixteen years ended up as the setup for the loser's best day of the decade.

Ravens 45, Rams 6 (2019). The most impressive performance on the list, because Baltimore did it on the road against a Rams team that had played in the Super Bowl ten months earlier.

Packers 45, Vikings 7 (2011). An unbeaten Green Bay team against a Minnesota side that had already lost six. Sometimes the schedule just picks the wrong November.

The unwatchable ones

Margin isn't quite the right measure of misery. A 59–28 game is a rout, but 87 points get scored and something happens on most drives. Two games on this list are worse than their margin suggests, because almost nothing happened at all:

• Patriots 33, Jets 0 (2019) — 33 total points in the entire game. The lowest-scoring blowout on the list.
• Packers 34, Saints 0 (2024) — 34 total points, four days before Christmas.

Both were shutouts, and only one Monday night since 2010 has been quieter: the 49ers' 28–0 over the Rams in 2016, which missed this list by three points of margin.

The Jets problem

Widen the lens a little, from 28-point blowouts to 25-point losses, and a pattern appears that the top-ten list only hints at. Thirty Monday night games since 2010 have been decided by 25 or more. Twenty franchises have taken one of those losses — but only seven have taken more than one, and the Jets have five by themselves, more than twice any other team.

Team	Losses by 25+ on Monday night, 2010–2025
New York Jets	5
Los Angeles Rams	2
Jacksonville	2
Minnesota	2
Cincinnati	2
New Orleans	2
New England	2

The obvious question is why the league kept scheduling them, and the answer is the New York market. The Jets were a fixture in the Monday package through a stretch where they were, in the aggregate, not good — the schedule was buying a big market and getting a bad football team.

The reverse table is less surprising:

Team	Wins by 25+ on Monday night, 2010–2025
New England	5
Buffalo	4
San Francisco	4
New Orleans	3

Buffalo owns three of the top six margins on this list — over Jacksonville, the Jets, and Tennessee — which is a fairly efficient way to become the team nobody wants to draw on a Monday.

Monday night blowouts vs. the other primetime slots

"Monday Night Football is unwatchable" is one of the most durable complaints in sports. Measured against the other primetime packages, it doesn't hold up:

Monday night sits below the league average and below Sunday night. Thursday night — the package with the worst reputation of all — produces the fewest blowouts of the three.

How often does a Monday night game actually go bad?

About once a season.

Twenty blowouts in sixteen years, from roughly eighteen Monday night games a season. Six of those seasons produced none at all — 2013, 2015, 2017, 2021, 2023, and 2025 — and no season has ever produced more than three.

Meanwhile 45.4% of Monday night games since 2010 were decided by seven points or fewer. Nearly half were one-score games.

The honest version of the complaint is narrower: when a Monday night game does go bad, it's the only game on, everyone is watching, and nobody forgets.

The schedule is set in May

Every game on that list was chosen months before it was played.

The NFL sets its Monday night slate in May, when the schedule is released — long before anyone knows that the Rams will be a shell of their Super Bowl team by Week 12, or that a Week 3 Jaguars trip to Buffalo will be a 37-point disaster. The schedule maker is making a bet on which matchups will be good in October and December using information available in April.

Seen that way, a 7.1% blowout rate is a remarkably good hit rate for a guess made six months out. The flex-scheduling rules exist precisely because the league knows it can't get these right in advance.

If you'd like to try making those calls yourself, our mock schedule builder enforces the same structural rules the league works under — including the primetime limits — so you can pick your own Monday nights for next season and find out in May how well you guessed.

The Jets, for what it's worth, are still available.

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Game data from MockSlate's NFL slot history dataset, built from nflverse/nfldata.

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