NFL 3-0 starts: Which undefeated teams are real contenders?

NFL teams that start the season 3-0 have one foot in the postseason door. Since 2002, 82 of the 111 teams to begin with three straight victories have advanced to the playoffs. That’s a success rate of nearly 74%, and it should rise even higher with more seasons of a 14-team playoff bracket. Just three teams began the season 3-0 in 2023, and unsurprisingly, the 49ers, Dolphins and Eagles all ended up playing postseason football.

The last time a team started 3-0 and missed the playoffs was 2021, when the Broncos and the Panthers both did it and then went a combined 6-22 afterward. While those failures are clearly the exception as opposed to the rule, there are fans of one 3-0 team in 2024 that might not want to remember who the quarterback was for the Panthers then.

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Let’s take a closer look at the five undefeated teams this season and how they’ve managed to get three straight victories. Are they exceeding expectations? One isn’t. Is what they’re doing sustainable? One team’s success is not, although it makes a habit of breaking the rules — and my brain — in the process. Which team is about to be awakened by a brutally tough schedule the rest of the way? Which is the most dominant team of the bunch? I’ll hit on all of those topics.

I want to start with the defending champs, though. I had lofty hopes for the Chiefs this season. Three wins in three games is all fans can ask for, but is Kansas City really playing like a dominant football team?

Jump to a 3-0 team:
Bills | Chiefs
Seahawks | Steelers | Vikings

The wins: vs. Baltimore (27-20), vs. Cincinnati (26-25), at Atlanta (22-17)

On one hand, the Chiefs are probably the least surprising team of the five that started 3-0. They’re the Chiefs — the two-time defending Super Bowl champs. I pegged them as one of the teams most likely to improve this season, even given their 11-6 record a year ago. If you asked 100 fans before the season to pick one team that would begin with three straight victories, they probably would have chosen the Chiefs.

And yet, if you were judging these teams on how they’ve played through three games, the Chiefs are probably the least impressive of the undefeated teams. They’ve had to play the Ravens and Bengals, but they could very easily be 0-3 if even a play or two in each game had gone differently. They were an inch of Isaiah Likely’s foot away from facing a 2-point conversion for the game in Week 1, needed a last-second field goal from 51 yards out to beat the Bengals in Week 2 and had to come up with a pair of red zone stops in the fourth quarter against the Falcons last Sunday to preserve a five-point victory.