0-17: The Race to the Bottom

Somewhere, the remaining members of the 2017 Cleveland Browns and 2008 Detroit Lions are getting a little antsy.

Five games in is a little early to start going in super-heavily on 0-17 talk. 0-5 isn’t that unusual, in the grand scheme of things – there have been 168 0-5 teams in NFL history, or roughly 1.6 a year. Teams get off to 0-5 starts all the time, and most of them eventually find their way to a win. Last year’s Jets stumbled their way to a 3-14 season; the 2023 Panthers got all the way to 2-15, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. It’s embarrassing – your season is basically over before the middle of October – but it’s a sign to start scouting the draft, not worrying about your place in all-time history.

That being said. The Dolphins, Titans and Chargers have to be feeling a little anxious, right?

We haven’t had three 0-5 teams at the same time since 2020, when the Falcons, Giants and Jets all faceplanted out of the gates in a very weird season. The more entries we have in the 0-17 sweepstakes, the better the odds we pull a winner.

And not all 0-5 teams are created equal. Sometimes, you get a team like the 2009 Titans, who shuddered to their bye week at 0-6, only to bounce back, switch to Vince Young, win five games in a row, and claw their way all the back to 8-8. But that doesn’t seem to be the case this year. With DVOAs of -47.2% (Miami), -39.0% (Tennessee), and -30.6% (Los Angeles), none of the three stooges of 2026 look particularly primed to suddenly flip a switch. The Dolphins, in particular, are the eighth-worst 0-5 team since 2002’s realignment. They’re no 2019 Dolphins or anything, but they can play the lowlights with the best of them.

Miami has yet to play a competitive game this season, as their late run against Cincinnati was almost exclusively in garbage time. The Titans and Chargers have come closer. The Titans and Giants were appropriately equally matched in Jameis Winston’s first start for New York, while the Bills slopped their way to five turnovers against the Chargers before eventually storming back. Still, close isn’t close enough

We’ve seen 0-16 teams before, and 0-14 teams and some odd zero-win teams from the NFL’s ancient history. But we’ve never actually had an 0-17 team, and whoever gets their first will have their own ignominious place in football history. They’ll have achieved something that Dan Orlovsky’s Lions couldn’t, nor the expansion Buccaneers or any other of the saddest teams in NFL history. They will be immortalized forever, whether they want to or not.

The odds are that none of these teams will be that first 0-17 squad. If it was easy, we would have seen it done by now. In FTN’s simulations, they all finish with somewhere between three and four mean wins by the end of the year. But once they get that first win, they stop becoming interesting. No one cares about a 1-9 team or a 2-12 team. But 0-5, 0-6, 0-8, 0-10…the longer it goes, the more real the odds of running the table becomes, the more anticipation builds and builds. It’s a reason to care about them, at least for a while. And we’ve been blessed with three of them.

So let’s look at our 0-5 survivors – what’s gone right, what’s gone very wrong, and where they’re most likely to get that first win and finally vanish from our national attention.

Miami Dolphins

Coach’s Mood? Resigned. Jeff Hafley knew what he was getting into, taking over a team that had over half their cap space earmarked for dead money.

“I have confidence in the coaches, I have confidence in the players we have. We will work through that and we will get better. It's been five weeks."

Biggest Blooper? Well, the Dolphins haven’t had a lead yet, so we’re a bit spoiled for choice. I like Bradley Pinion forgetting the “kicking the ball” part of a punt against San Francisco. Maybe a bit mean to pile on a punter, of all things, but does anything sum up the Dolphins season better than only doing half of a play? They’re only half of a team, after all.

Bright Spots? Josh Uche has been a sure tackler for them – a decent 4.1% stuff rate for an edge rusher, one of the team’s four sacks and one of their three forced fumbles. He’s someone they might be able to trade away at the deadline for a middle-round pick next year.

Jordyn Brooks was one of the few players they opted to keep this offseason, and he’s hanging in there, second on the team with 43 tackles and finding himself in the middle of the play more often than not.

Ollie Gordon, forced into a starting role because De’Von Achane got hurt, is 10th in rushing DYAR and second in DVOA behind only Kyren Williams. Only James Cook and Jahmyr Gibbs have a higher explosive rate than Gordon, and while some of that is garbage time against Cincinnati, the ability to get something going on offense in Miami is something noteworthy.

Their top three picks – Kadyn Proctor, Chris Johnson and Jacob Rodriguez – have all been playing a lot and getting valuable experience, and they certainly don’t look worse than the rest of the roster. There’s not a lot of strong praise here, but there’s a few players who can hold their head higher than others at this point.

Wait, they can make the playoffs? Yes, technically! You like them to win nine of their 10 games coming off of the bye? Find ways to compete against the likes of the Packers in Lambeau or the Broncos at Mile High? Hope springs eternal, even for the hopeless.

Most Likely First Wins: Is it weird if I kind of like them in Week 8 against the Patriots? Not love or anything; we’re talking about the defending AFC Champions who may have just found their mojo once again. But we saw how New England struggled in their first three games, and the Patriots do have a history in Miami. They’re only 3-7 in their last 10 trips down south, and haven’t won back-to-back games there since 2011-12. If New England keeps up the way they’ve been playing the last two weeks over the next two, no, Miami is getting wiped off the map. But if these last two games are the mirage, and Drake Maye reverts to the interception-prone reckless player he was in September? Maybe the Dolphins would have, say, a 35% chance of pulling off an upset.

Otherwise, we’re looking at the Jets – either with the benefit of the bye week in Week 7, or playing at home in Week 12. The Jets do seem to be playing on a higher tier than the Dolphins this season, but it’s not like they’ve suddenly become formidable – they’re 22nd in DVOA, and their offense remains bad, just bad in a safe, risk-free sort of way. The home game in November is probably the first game where I would outright pick the Dolphins as things stand right now, but two cracks at the Jets were always going to be Miami’s best chance to win this season, and neither of those games have happened yet. You can imagine a heavy dose of Ollie Gordon against New York’s 26th-ranked run defense, shortening the game and reducing the number of opportunities they have to make mistakes. I could see it!