Can Carolina or Chicago Recover from an 0-4 Start?

When is a team dead, and when are they just in serious trouble?

No team can be mathematically eliminated until the season is at least half done, but we all know that some teams’ playoff hopes wither and die well before the math catches up. Some teams are already booking tee times in October. Some teams never had hope before the season began in the first place! When do we write a team off?

An 0-4 start is obviously a problem. Only once in NFL history has a team rebounded from an 0-4 start to make the playoffs. That would be the 1992 Chargers, who went on to win 11 of their next 12 games, win their division, and get revenge for one of their losses by beating the Chiefs in the Wild Card round before ultimately being blanked by the Dolphins in the postseason. It’s a feat that has never been replicated since.

But other teams have taken real shots at it, trying to dig themselves out of that 0-4 hole. The 2004 Bills fought back to 9-6, only missing the playoffs thanks to embarrassingly losing to the Steelers’ backups, led by Tommy Maddox and Willie Parker. That dropped them to 9-7, a game behind the Jets and Broncos – and they would have missed out, even with a seventh seed, because they lost head-to-head against the nine-win Jaguars and Ravens. The 2017 Chargers also recovered from an 0-4 start to go 9-7, only to be last in a four-way tie for two wildcard slots behind the Titans, Bills and Ravens; five conference losses will do that for you. In slightly luckier situations, either team could have found themselves in the postseason.

Part of the issue here is that there are 0-4 teams and there are teams that just happen to have four-game losing streaks, and those are two different calibers of teams. Losing games 1-4 doesn’t hurt you more than losing games 9-12; a loss is a loss. But only one of 155 teams to start 0-4 since the merger has made the playoffs, or 0.6%. 37 of 757 teams with a four-game losing streak at any point have made the postseason, or 4.9%. Heck, the Dolphins and Jaguars pulled that off just last season!

The difference is, 41% of teams with a four-game losing streak stop the slide then and there, and 64% stop it after five games. But teams that start 0-4? They get to 1-4 just 32% of the time, and dodge the dreaded 0-6 start just 58% of the time. There are a subset of teams with four straight losses who just had bad luck – perhaps an injury to a starter, or a brutal slate of schedules, or just a string of untimely fumbles. Great teams don’t lose four in a row, and good teams rarely do, but an above-average team can absolutely have a month to forget, regroup, and then go on a run. But if you start the season 0-4? That’s generally a sign that you’re just a bad football team. Theoretically, the start of the season is when your team should be healthiest and the most prepared. If you come out of the gate and fall flat on your face, you’re probably not an above-average team. The 1992 Chargers had the excuse of a last-second quarterback change, with John Friesz falling in preseason. Most teams that start 0-4 aren’t there; they’re in a “we built our team badly” position.

That brings us to our pair of 0-4 teams this season, the Chicago Bears and Carolina Panthers. Suffice it to say, neither team is exactly where they hoped to be when the season began. The Bears thought that Justin Fields might make The Leap; he had solid MVP odds before the season began in what was laughable at the time and downright hysterical now. The Panthers, meanwhile, traded up to get Bryce Young as their franchise savior. Through four weeks, he has been the worst of the three first-round rookie passers, with C.J. Stroud excelling in Houston and Anthony Richardson flashing in Indianapolis.

Fans of both teams could be justified with writing their season off now, despite the fact that they’re mathematically still in the race. They’re probably right, too; FTN gives the Bears a 0.5% chance of making the playoffs; the Panthers a 1.2% chance. But those aren’t 0%! What would it look like at the end of the year if we’re talking about a playoff berth for one of these teams? What does an 0-4 comeback look like in 2023?

Let’s focus on the Panthers today, for a couple reasons. First of all, they’re technically in a worse spot than Chicago right now. While both teams are 0-4, all four Panthers losses have come in conference. To make matters worse, they’re also 0-2 in the NFC South, joining the Browns as the only team with two divisional losses so far. And two of their losses have come against the Seahawks and Falcons, both of whom are currently sitting in playoff position. It’s hard to imagine worse tiebreakers.

But, on the other hand, it’s more realistic to imagine a Panthers turnaround than a Bears one. They rank higher than Chicago in both DVOA (-34.2% to -44.3%) and DAVE (-23.0% to -28.7%), meaning they’ve both been better so far this season and were expected to be better before the year began. Carolina’s defense has been above average so far this year; it’s the offense that has been letting them down. And perhaps the light comes on for Young sooner rather than later. He’s still the prospect that wowed scouts with his ability to read the field and handle pressure, and three games of struggle doesn’t erase that. It is, at the very least, more likely that Young turns things around after 208 career snaps than it is that Fields turns things around after 1,802.

Right. How do we dig the Panthers out of their 0-4 hole and send them to the playoffs?

Mathematically, we need to find at least five more wins for Carolina; there is no way a 4-13 team can make the postseason at this point. To get things into a reasonable chance, we need to find eight wins; we’ve seen 8-9 teams make the postseason before, and a collapse of the other three teams in the NFC South could open up the fourth seed far at a lower win total than the final wildcard spot ends up requiring. They’d more likely need ten wins to have better than a 50/50 chance of making the playoffs and 11 wins to feel confident about making it no matter what, but let’s not get too crazy here.

Finding five wins, let alone eight, feels like a massive uphill battle for Carolina at the moment, but that’s sort of the point – the Carolina at the moment isn’t going to make the playoffs, but a theoretical Carolina where the light has come on for Young, where the protection is giving him more time in the pocket, where the running game can get more than three yards a carry? That team would have a chance, if they can turn things around fast enough. Yes, we can find all sorts of crazy scenarios where the Panthers qualify at 7-10 and nonsense like that, but we’re early enough in the year where that isn’t strictly necessary. Carolina can still take care of their own business and get through.

The schedule doesn’t get much easier for Carolina in the near future, with brutal back-to-back road trips to the Lions and Dolphins coming up, followed by a bye. Even in the most optimistic of scenarios, it’s difficult to imagine Carolina turning things around quickly enough to run with either of those offenses. So, in this bluest of Carolina blue sky thinking, let’s not go so far as to say they win either game, but that they look a little better each time, making consistent progress. The ball starts coming out faster. Frank Reich installs some easy-button passing plays, simplifying reads and helping Young get into a rhythm earlier – and not just ten thousand screen passes, which seems to be the current strategy.

So the Panthers stumble into the bye at 0-6, but with a little positive momentum and optimism going forwards. No 0-6 team has ever had a winning record, but Carolina’s schedule significantly opens up after that point – their average opponent has a DVOA of just -8.5% after the bye, compared to 9.7% before.

Maybe, then, Carolina gets on a hot streak. The run the gauntlet of rookie passers, beating C.J. Stroud’s Texans and Anthony Richardson’s Colts in back-to-back home games, at least temporarily quieting down people who say they blew the top pick. They handle Justin Fields and the Bears the next week in the battle of teams sitting at 0-4 at the moment. On a roll, they come back home in Week 11 and shockingly upset the Cowboys, a team who has been playing stellar defense but hasn’t quite started clicking on offense just yet and did get embarrassed by the Cardinals two weeks ago. Riding high off of that, they end up taking two out of three on their last big road trip of the season against Tennessee, Tampa Bay and New Orleans, before defending Bank of America Stadium the rest of the way against the Falcons, Packers and Buccaneers.

I fully admit, the Cowboys game is a bit of a stretch, but any turnaround from 0-4 to the playoffs will require something shocking, and it seems more likely to happen two months from now at home than in the next couple weeks on the road. Add that all up, and the Panthers finish the year at 9-8, a more than respectable record, and one with a puncher’s chance of making the postseason.

The Panthers have already done nearly irreparable damage to their tiebreakers. Head-to-head losses to Atlanta, Carolina and New Orleans already have caused massive problems, in ways expected (head-to-head tiebreakers! Bad conference record! Bad divisional record!) and unexpected (Seattle and New Orleans are common opponents with the Rams!). In most cases, Carolina will have to finish above their opponents if they want to finish ahead in the standings. That’s not really a problem; there aren’t that many teams in the NFC who look capable of getting to nine or ten wins at the moment, especially if Carolina is handing out Ls to the likes of Tampa Bay and Green Bay.

Most worrisome would probably be the Saints; they already won the head-to-head matchup in Carolina, so continuing their current losing streak while Derek Carr’s shoulder heals up wouldn’t go amiss; nor would losing on the road to lower-quality teams like Minnesota. The Rams, who look less dead than anticipated, might also cause some troubles, especially if they get a boost from the return of Cooper Kupp. They, too, could stand to lose some road games to below-average teams – the Packers, Cardinals and Giants for instance.

But that’s mostly window dressing. If the Panthers can find a way to improve their own performance, they’re likely to get in on their own merits, rather than anyone else collapsing around them.

Is that at all likely? No, of course not – the Panthers have yet to have a respectable game on offense or a good one defensively, and the odds are this will continue for the foreseeable future. But the point is that it’s early enough for things to turn around, if you truly believe in Bryce Young and the offense. 0-4 is a terrible, terrible start – but the only reason it’s been a historical death sentence is that terrible teams go 0-4. If Carolina – or Chicago, for that matter – can just be a little less terrible, there’s still time to save the season.

Best of luck with that.

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Bryan Knowles

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