Did you know NFL teams that start the season 0-2 rarely make it to the postseason?
Yes, you probably already knew that. You've probably heard the percentages on this referenced over and over for the past few days, both before and after Sunday's games. Since the NFL went to 12 playoff teams in 1990, only 12 percent of teams to start the season 0-2 have made the postseason. Since the switch to eight divisions in 2002, it's just 10.5 percent.
However, while each individual 0-2 team has only a small chance to make the playoffs, the odds that at least one of them will actually do it are much higher. Each week, Football Outsiders runs 50,000 season simulations for our playoff odds report. In 41.2 percent of our simulations this week, one of the teams that is currently 0-2 makes its way to the playoffs. In fact, three teams have done it in the past two seasons.
A year ago, Miami was 0-2 and 27th in Football Outsiders' DVOA ratings after two weeks. They didn't turn it around immediately, either; the Dolphins were 1-4 and 28th in DVOA after five weeks. But they went 9-2 the rest of the way to win an AFC wild card. And in 2015, two teams rebounded from 0-2 starts to make the playoffs: Seattle (23rd in DVOA after two weeks) and Houston (28th).
We've gone through the nine 0-2 teams below to look at what's gone wrong so far, what has occasionally gone right and what are the chances for each team to rebound and make it into the postseason. The ratings we use for our simulation are based 20 percent on performance so far and 80 percent on our preseason projections. However, even with only two games played, the winless teams have played poorly enough to suggest that they will be bad for the remainder of the season -- with one clear exception.