Week 4 of the 2026 season is here, five teams are still chasing their first win, and the league's oldest cautionary tale is back on the table.
Only one team in NFL history has made the playoffs after starting 0-4. Everyone repeats that number like a sentence. I'll argue with how it gets used. The record isn't a cause of anything. It's a receipt. Teams that start 0-4 are almost always teams that were going to be bad anyway: no running game, a quarterback room that thinned out in August, a defense that can't get off the field. The four losses didn't break them. The four losses are what a broken roster looks like on paper.
So the stat is descriptive, not predictive. If one of these five is genuinely good and just drew a miserable opening month, the number means less than the tape does. That's the test I'm applying. I don't care that the history is thin. I care whether the team in front of me can block anybody.
My read: none of the five is that team. Good rosters rarely hide behind 0-3, and by Week 4 the schedule stops being an excuse. None of them are eliminated. All of them are behind, and the gap is the kind that compounds. What the next few weeks decide for these five isn't the playoff race. It's which general managers start working January's draft board in October, and which head coaches spend November answering questions about their jobs. The urgency isn't about the postseason. It's about who's still employed when the postseason starts.
Then there's Sean McVay, who is 0-4 against Nick Sirianni.
McVay has been one of the best coaches in football since he took a head job in 2017. This is the one column on his spreadsheet with nothing but zeroes in it. Four games is a small sample, and I'll say plainly that I don't think it's noise. Head-to-head records between good coaches usually expose something structural. A 4-0 edge between two men who call a game differently tends to mean one style is getting imposed on the other, and it usually shows up before the scoreboard does.
Here's the angle nobody is using: the number won't get settled in the regular season, and that's the trap. If these two keep meeting in January, the 0-4 is the first graphic on every broadcast and the last thing a locker room forgets. Sirianni holds the psychological leverage that comes free with a perfect record. He only has to avoid losing it. McVay has to take it, and taking it means beating a coach who has never given him a reason to believe he can.
If they line up again, I'm taking Sirianni. Not because four games prove he's the better coach. Because McVay wins with preparation and structure, and preparation and structure are precisely what a coach holding a four-game head start knows how to erase.
My verdict on the day, on the record: all five winless teams miss the playoffs, and the McVay-Sirianni streak survives their next meeting. Check back in January and hold me to both.
