Playoffs? Playoffs?!: Salvaging the Chargers and Texans

When is it too late to salvage a season?

In NFL history, only one 0-4 team has ever rebounded to make the playoffs. The 1992 San Diego Chargers were outright terrible to begin the season. It wasn’t just that they were 0-4 – they were an outmatched 0-4, with 23-6 losses to Pittsburgh and 27-0 to Houston leaving them for dead. It wasn’t a case of them being secretly good and unlikely, either. They had a -29.7% DVOA through four weeks and were legitimately getting their heads kicked in. Then, seemingly out of nowhere, the light clicked. Stan Humphries stopped throwing interceptions. The defensive shift from 3-4 to 4-3 suddenly gelled. San Diego won 11 of their next 12 games, shut the Chiefs out in the Wild Card round, and then got crushed by Dan Marino in the Divisional. But at least they got there, which didn’t feel possible at the end of September.

It is, in theory, easier to recover from an 0-4 start now than it was in 1992. There’s an extra slot in each conference, and an extra game to make up the gap. Still, it hasn’t been done, and the odds are, it won’t be done in 2026, either.

But mostly dead doesn’t mean entirely dead. You can’t be eliminated from the playoffs until halfway through the season, because that’s how math works. But it’s an interesting exercise to look at some of the mostly dead teams and see just what it would take to jump from now to the playoffs. We know it would take a minor miracle, but what would said miracle actually entail?

There are currently five 0-4 teams – the Buccaneers, Chargers, Titans, Dolphins and Texans. Miami and Tennessee were always expected to be here; rebuilding teams losing a bunch of games is not a surprise. Tampa Bay might have the easiest path to recover from their start as the NFC South remains the league’s weakest division, but they have to try to figure out how to get a win or two until Baker Mayfield returns in a month and a half, and that’s tricky.

No, the two most interesting teams here are the Chargers and Texans. Both were considered legitimate Super Bowl contenders before the season started – the Chargers with +1500 odds, the Texans at +2000. And yet, in a real way, the two teams are the two furthest from the playoffs as we speak. As things stand now, the Chargers are 14th in the AFC; the Texans 16th. Both already have a loss in the division, too – the other three 0-4 teams could still in theory run the table in their own divisions. The Texans have even managed three conference losses in four weeks. It’s almost impossible to dig a deeper hole.

And yet, DVOA still gives the Texans a 31.8% chance of making the playoffs – partially because they were so high preseason favorites, and partially because they’re actually playing significantly better than an 0-4 record would indicate. The Chargers, on the other hand? DVOA is more than willing to abandon that ship, with them falling all the way to a 3.3% chance.

Let’s take a look at these two preseason favorites turned October nightmares, looking at what they’ve done so far and their schedule to come, and try to imagine what these miracle playoff runs would actually look like.

And let’s start with the longshot.

Los Angeles Chargers

From the praise Justin Herbert receives on a regular basis from John Harbaugh, you’d expect him to be on a list with Johnny Unitas. Just maybe not this one.

This is every Charger quarterback to start a season with at least five interceptions and 10 sacks in the first four games:

The list is John Hadl as the Chargers struggled with joining the NFL, the legendary Johnny Unitas is his very much not legendary final, washed-up season in San Diego, and all-time bust Ryan Leaf. And Herbert, who Harbaugh claims will be remembered as the greatest quarterback of all time. Ow.

The Chargers have the lowest offensive DVOA in the league right now – even worse than the Vikings, who are setting records for offensive futility, and they’re 4-0. The Los Angeles offense is fundamentally broken right now. Linemen are blowing blocks and misunderstanding their assignments, especially in the passing game – they rank 27^th in ESPN’s pass rush win rate. Injuries to the interior of the line have left it entirely untrustworthy. They lead the league in offensive penalties and pre-snap penalties; an uncharacteristic lack of discipline for a Jim Harbaugh team. Receivers not named Ladd McConkey are not getting open. Quentin Johnston has the eighth-worst open rating in ESPN’s receiving scores. And, of course, there’s Herbert.

Bottom ten in catchable ball percentage, interception-worthy throws, highlight-worthy throws, success rate, DVOA, DYAR, CPOE – it’s an entire alphabet soup of trouble. Mike McDaniel was very clear that he was tweaking Herbert’s footwork and adjusting the way he read defenses – it’s important that the two of them understand coverages in the same way so they can coordinate their attack. And Herbert is visibly not comfortable. It’s no surprise his best play this year came in the second half of the Seattle game, where garbage time and desperation led to softer coverages and more rapid, hurry-up throws from Herbert. He’s doing his best when he’s falling back on instinct and what he’s done for years; it’s running the offense that’s causing him problems.

Justin Herbert is better than this. Jim Harbaugh is better than this. While neither is entirely blameless for this lifeless offense, the bulk of the pressure has to come down on McDaniel.

The true test of a great playcaller is what the hell you do when your shit stops working. McDaniel’s offenses in Miami set records because it was designed around a receiving corps with incredible ability to create separation and gain YAC, with Tyreek Hill, Jaylen Waddle and De’Von Achane turning the field into a race track. When he was in San Francisco, he and Kyle Shanahan did much the same with Deebo Samuel and George Kittle. That’s great, but it simply is not working, and McDaniel’s attempts to create offense are simply not working. McDaniel’s offenses attacked the intermediate middle of the field on 72% of their passes in Miami; the Chargers are hitting there less than 45%. The bread and butter is not there. They don’t have the horses – Quentin Johnson is a deep threat; Ladd McConkey hurt, Charlie Kolar an underneath guy and Oronde Gadsden best outside the numbers. I think the hope was that the innate skill of Herbert would be enough to cover some of the square peg in round hole-ness the skill position players have, but that plan has not worked. Instead, it feels like McDaniel tried to fix something, and ended up breaking it. Where is Plan B?

I still believe Mike McDaniel is better than this, too, though he doesn’t have the same track record as Harbaugh and Herbert. It takes time for an offense to gel, and I believe that those frustrating pre-snap penalties and miscommunications will go down as they get more experience. Execute cleaner, and that misdirection and timing that is the hallmark of McDaniels’ offense will start to actually appear on the field. Not everything can be fixed this year – they should have spent some of that cap space to bring in more help – but maybe they can simplify some things, lean more on the running game which ranks 17th in DVOA, find themselves in some more manageable situations. Stagger to the bye, do some self-scouting and come out strong.

Even assuming that works, is there enough time left to do that? Well, just about.

It is mathematically possible for the Chargers to make the playoffs by going 5-8 from this point on, but that would require massively improbable results around the league. They’re almost, but not quite, guaranteed to make the playoffs if they go 13-0 from now on, but that’s similarly laughable – the Chargers have the third-hardest schedule remaining; asking them to become juggernaughts and running the table stretches belief. We’re looking for a balance between ease of playoff access and belivability for our longshot playoff hopes.

This was the best I could come up with, after toying around with Ray Lehnhoff’s Playoff Predictors, still the gold standard for this sort of thing.

Going 9-4 from here on out puts the Chargers in the playoffs about 45% of the time, usually as the sixth or seventh seed. It’s early enough that we don’t need to be too exacting about exactly who around them gets in and out, though multiple games against Denver plus games against Houston and New England at least broadly suggest that those should be the teams the Chargers are rooting against. Some head-to-head wins both keep your opponents down and buy you some tiebreaker benefits, and those will come in handy later. But the Broncos are still well in the “win more games, stupid” section of desperation playoff hopes, and the exact specifics would work themselves out.

Part of the idea behind the specific wins we’re giving the Chargers here is telling the narrative of a team getting to their Week 7 bye week, regrouping, and finding ways to piece together an offense over the back two-thirds of the season. That being said, it would still really help if the Chargers could at least split the season series with the Broncos and Chiefs, so I went ahead and gave the Chargers a win over Denver this week, while the Broncos may be missing both starting corners and Pat Bryant – strike while the iron is hot.

I don’t yet see the need to force the Chargers to beat teams like the Chiefs, Rams or Ravens on the road – beating a major contender in their house would certainly help the Chargers’ cause, but we’re not quite down to desperation just yet. We’re already asking them to split with the Chiefs and beat San Francisco on a short week late in December anyway; the 49ers are banged up often enough that the aging core may need to take an extra week off rather than deal with an incredibly short turnaround. The other wins are split into needed wins against other potential wild card contenders (Texans, Patriots, Raiders) and wins against bad teams that Los Angeles absolutely can not afford to let slip through their fingers (Jets, Buccaneers, Dolphins). An 0-4 start really just means you’ve already used up all your margin for error – 24 teams since 2002’s realignment have a four-game losing streak somewhere in their season and still rebounded for the playoffs. So there’s still time, just not much of it.

The hard part is, well, being good enough to actually win one game, much less nine. A legal professional on the DVOA Discord pointed out that this is a good example of reasonable doubt. “So it’s possible that the Chargers make to playoffs, right? It could happen? But is it reasonable?”.

No, it’s not. If we want to find a reasonable path for an 0-4 team to make the playoffs, we’ve got to go deep in the heart of Texas.