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Bill Barnwell, ESPN Staff Writer
Beginning a season with back-to-back losses leaves an NFL team in dire straits. Since the league moved to its 32-team format in 2002, about one in every 10 teams to start 0-2 has made it to the postseason. Last season, of the nine teams that started the season with two consecutive defeats, the Texans were the only team to advance to the playoffs.
If a team falls to 0-3, though, it had might as well start making vacation plans for January. Again going back to 2002, 103 squads have started the season with three straight defeats. The 2018 Texans are the only one that managed to turn things around and make it to the postseason. The 2013 Steelers could be added to the list by pretending the league had a 14-team playoff over that time. That’s two in 103. The chances are just below 2%.
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So now, just two weeks into the season, nine teams face what amounts to must-win games next weekend. Let’s run through those teams and their chances of being the one in 10 that turns things around. I’ll start with the franchises that have the best chance of righting the ship and end with those furthest away from contention. At this time last season, I was the most skeptical of the Texans, and they proved me wrong by going 10-5 the rest of the way. Can any team match them in 2024?
No. 1 on this list is the team I’m still most optimistic about. And as a surprise, it’s not the team that won 13 games a year ago. Instead, it’s a rival of that team that should be able to ride a friendly schedule over the next couple of weeks back to the .500 mark:
Jump to an 0-2 team:
Broncos | Bengals | Colts
Giants | Jaguars | Panthers
Rams | Ravens | Titans
Chances of advancing to the postseason, via ESPN’s FPI: 43.2%
I wrote last week about a frustrating Bengals loss at the hands of the Patriots. They played much better against the Chiefs on Sunday and probably deserved to win, but they experienced a rerun of one of their least favorite moments at exactly the wrong time. After a late penalty set up the Chiefs in field goal range and knocked the Bengals out in the 2022 AFC Championship Game, a pass interference call on fourth-and-16 Sunday extended the game for Kansas City and yielded a Harrison Butker game winner to push Cincinnati to 0-2.
For the second straight week, a fumble also victimized Cincinnati’s chances. In Week 1, Tanner Hudson’s fumble inside the 5-yard line cost it a touchdown. This week, it was a strip sack of Joe Burrow that was recovered by the Chiefs and returned for a score. The Bengals have fumbled six times through three games, a remarkable total for a team that fumbled only 10 times last season.