NFL Power Rankings Week 9: Rock Bottom Watch for League's Cellar Dwellers

Hitting rock bottom is not an attractive option for anyone in any circumstance, and it's the same when talking about an NFL team. There's nothing rewarding that comes from being one of the worst teams in the league—to be sure—but to hit rock bottom is another thing altogether.

Rock bottom for a football team means not just being a terrible or winless team—it's when a team, coaches and players, begin to look at yet another loss as an inevitability, that there's nothing worth salvaging.

It means a team completely gives up.

And, through eight weeks of the season, there's just one team that has hit rock bottom, and appropriately enough they sit at No. 32 of the power rankings: the Indianapolis Colts.

The Colts had the wind knocked out of them in the preseason, when it was determined that quarterback Peyton Manning needed another neck procedure that would likely keep him off the field for most, if not all, of the regular season.

Instead of reacting appropriately, there seemed to be an overarching sense of panic emanating from the Colts organization, and it was the first body blow to knock them off of a stable path for the season.

While they failed to recover from it quickly enough, the lack of Manning also exposed other extreme dings and dents in the formerly-flawless team, none of which they've been able to repair through eight winless weeks.

They are continually fielding the league's worst defense (via Football Outsiders), just a few years removed from having one of the NFL's most dominant.

They struggle with running the ball, and don't have the foresight to plan for Manning's injury—they have neither a competent backup nor a truly effective veteran waiting in the wings. It's clear that the deck is stacked against the Colts and that morale cannot be high in the locker room.

But, wins, losses, failure and injury, are part of life in the NFL. It's assumed that the majority of players and coaches—you know, teams—would be able to shrug things off just enough to not give up on the season or on the team's chances to derive anything positive.

Not the Colts, it appears, who seem to have settled in for the long haul as the league's worst in 2011. They seem content to change nothing, believing that sitting on the bottom tier is what they deserve, what they have earned and where they will stay for the full duration of the season.

And that's what rock bottom is. Yes, while there are other struggling teams, other teams with win totals of one or none—none of those teams seem to have the kind of quit in them that the Colts do.

That's why they get the sole distinction of having hit their darkest days in recent memory.

NFL Power Rankings, Week 9
 
1. Green Bay Packers
2. San Francisco 49ers
3. Pittsburgh Steelers
4. Houston Texans
5. New England Patriots
6. Buffalo Bills
7. Baltimore Ravens
8. Detroit Lions
9. New Orleans Saints
10. Cincinnati Bengals
11. Atlanta Falcons
12. New York Jets
13. Philadelphia Eagles
14. Chicago Bears
15. Tennessee Titans
16. Kansas City Chiefs
17. New York Giants
18. Oakland Raiders
19. San Diego Chargers
20. Tampa Bay Buccaneers
21. Dallas Cowboys
22. Carolina Panthers
23. Cleveland Browns
24. Jacksonville Jaguars
25. St. Louis Rams
26. Minnesota Vikings
27. Seattle Seahawks
28. Washington Redskins
29. Arizona Cardinals
30. Miami Dolphins
31. Denver Broncos
32. Indianapolis Colts