Week 4 arrives with the NFL already sorting itself. Five teams are still looking for their first win, one head coach is still looking for his first win against a specific peer, and two franchises are still looking for something that football can't give them. Here's the roundup.
Denver travels to San Francisco on Sunday, and Sean Payton spent the week handing high praise to the 49ers' coaching staff. That's a tell. Coaches who like their matchup talk about their own team; coaches who don't talk about how well-coached the other sideline is. Payton isn't being polite. He's being accurate, and accurate is the worse outcome for the Broncos.
Sean McVay is 0-4 against Nick Sirianni. Four meetings, four losses, no wins anywhere in the file. I'll be honest about the sample: four games is small, and I'm not going to inflate it into a referendum. But it's also the entire sample. There is no McVay-over-Sirianni result to point at and call the baseline, no outlier to throw out. If the Rams want a different number, something has to change that isn't variance, because variance would have handed them one by now.
Five NFL teams enter Week 4 without a victory, which means each of them is one loss away from 0-4. Only one 0-4 team has ever made the playoffs. One. Ever. That's not the same thing as a slow start. A slow start is 1-2 with a soft schedule coming. This is a hole that history says is not climbable, and the honest framing for those five teams is that they are no longer chasing a playoff spot. They're auditioning for the one after it, and they'll be doing it in front of a fan base that has already started doing the math.
The Bears say their focus is a new stadium in Indiana. A new Bears stadium in Illinois could be publicly owned. And Roger Goodell met with Illinois governor JB Pritzker on Oct. 1 to discuss the plans. Two states, one commissioner, one team that gets to keep describing the other option as the real one. That's not confusion, that's leverage, and the Bears don't need Indiana so much as they need Illinois to believe they'd go. The phrase Bears fans should actually sit with is "publicly owned" — that's the version where somebody else writes the check. Meanwhile the football operation keeps playing on top of an unresolved business, and unresolved business has a way of outlasting coaching staffs.
Maxx Crosby said the quiet part out loud: Vegas is a different type of city, and the Raiders have to earn their home-field advantage. "The fans come out, they want to see a winner. We have to earn that." He's right, and it's a problem he cannot fix by saying it. Most franchises get their home edge handed down through generations of people who never had a choice about caring. Crosby says his team is new to this city, which means it started at zero, in a town with a thousand better ways to spend a Sunday. That's a structural tax. Losing rosters disappear here faster than anywhere else, and the only currency that buys a crowd is winning, which is exactly what bad teams can't produce.
Sunday will answer the football questions. Denver gets a look at whether Payton's praise was respect or a warning. McVay gets another shot at the one coach who has never lost to him. The other three stories don't get answered Sunday, or in December. A stadium the Bears can't unilaterally build, and a home-field advantage the Raiders can't buy, will both still be exactly where they are when the season ends. Those are the ones worth watching.
