The Long Road Back: NFL Ties League History With 5 Winless Teams Through Week 4

There’s a race to the bottom of the NFL standings four games into the season, including some surprisingly winless teams. A record-tying five teams are 0-4 one month in, marking just the seventh time that has happened in NFL history and the first since 2019. Some of the winless teams aren’t too surprising, with Miami there as part of a rebuild in a season when the Dolphins are carrying a record $184 million in dead money charges on the salary cap. Tennessee is winless after back-to-back three-win seasons. The other winless teams are a bit more of a surprise: Tampa Bay is there after coming into the season as the favorite to win the NFC South, while Houston and the Los Angeles Chargers are 0-4 after making the playoffs last season. This is just the third time in NFL history that two teams started a season 0-4 after making the playoffs the previous season. It also happened in 1999 with defending conference champions Atlanta and Denver doing it, and in 1992 with the Los Angeles Raiders and New York Jets both starting 0-4. The Buccaneers have lost four one-score games, with their minus-20 point differential the fifth-best ever for an 0-4 team, and the best since Minnesota was outscored by 19 points over the first four games in 2011. The Chargers haven’t been nearly as competitive, getting outscored by 39 points for the second-worst point differential in the league so far. The start for the Texans has been frustrating because they have led in the final 2 minutes in three of the four losses, including a 34-30 loss to Dallas on Sunday when the Cowboys scored the winning touchdown with 40 seconds to play. They are the second team since at least 1991 to lose three times in the first four games after leading in the final 2 minutes. The Chargers did it in 2016. The only other teams in the Super Bowl era to start the season 0-4 despite leading at any point in the fourth quarter in three of the games were the 2013 Bucs and 2011 Vikings. C.J. Stroud is the first quarterback since 1950, when starts were first tracked, to lose the first four games of a season without throwing an interception. Three teams have started the season 4-0, with Kansas City and Minnesota doing it after missing the playoffs in 2025. The last time two teams started 4-0 after missing the playoffs was 2013, when the Chiefs and New Orleans did it. Reporting by the Associated Press.