Does a 4-0 NFL Start Mean You're Playoff Bound?

The weather is starting to turn, and the leaves are falling around the country. And that can only mean one thing in the football world: we’ve made it past the first quarter of the season. The first four weeks of the NFL season have essentially turned into the preseason, except the games actually matter.

NFL teams have stopped caring about the preseason and are now using the first month of the year to prepare for the rest of the season. It’s why we have seen sloppy play across the league and a bunch of surprising outcomes.

So how excited should you be if your team is 4-0 or 3-1 to start the season? Should you start planning your trip to the postseason? Should you place a wager on them to hoist the Lombardi Trophy at the end of the year? 

And what about if your team is 0-4 and 1-3? Is it time to start watching draft prospects? Let’s dive into the data to see how much a good or bad start really matters.

Great Starts Matter!

Starting the season 4-0, regardless of the opponent, is tough. Typically, only 1 to 3 teams start 4-0 each year, especially now that franchises are completely throwing in the towel in the preseason. But what does a 4-0 start mean?

Since 2002, 87% of teams that started 4-0 have made the postseason, according to Vertize Sports. If we shrink the sample size to the last 10 years, nearly 90% of teams that start 4-0 make the postseason.

Some recent examples include teams that started the season hot but didn’t make the postseason, including the 2016 Denver Broncos, who were 4-0 before finishing the season at 9-7.

Since the expansion of the NFL playoffs in 2020, 14 teams have started 4-0. Here are those 14 teams: 

2020: Steelers (started 11-0), Chiefs, Bills, Packers, Titans, Seahawks

2021: Cardinals

2022: Eagles

2023: Eagles, 49ers

2024: Chiefs, Vikings

2025: Bills, Eagles

Of the 14 teams that started 4-0 during this stretch, three made it to the Super Bowl (bolded) that season. A fast start certainly doesn’t guarantee postseason success, but it does mean that a team will more than likely be in the playoffs. In this sample, all 14 made the postseason. 

But what about a 3-1 start? Surely that would have similar results, right? Your assumption would be correct. Since 2002, 64% of teams that started 3-1 made the postseason. And if you narrow that to since 2020, about 78% of teams make the postseason after a fast start.

Obviously, starting off fast with a 3-1 or a 4-0 record is ideal. But does it predict who will win the Super Bowl? Here are the first-quarter records for the last 10 Super Bowl Champions, starting with the Seattle Seahawks in 2025 via Pro-Football-Reference:

These 10 Super Bowl winners combined for a record of 29-11 in their first 40 games, which shouldn’t be super surprising. It’s worth noting that several of the teams that had one loss failed to win in Week 1, which tends to be the most random of the weeks of the NFL.

Slow Starts Are Deadly

The old mantra in the NFL is that you just want to be 2-2 after the first month of the season and you’ll give yourself a chance. And for the most part, that’s true. As long as a team has a record of 2-2, they’ll have a decent chance of making the postseason later that year.

The issue is when teams fall short of that goal. Since 2002, only 24 of 246 teams started the season with 0 or 1 wins and made it to the postseason. That is less than a 10% chance. For context, 68 teams have started 0-4 since 2002; none have made the postseason. We should mention that the 1992 Chargers started the season 0-4 and made the postseason and they are the only team to accomplish that feat. 

1-3 isn’t quite a death knell, but it’s close. And it’s really just a math problem. The average record needed to make the postseason as a Wild Card is 10-7. So, a 1-3 team would need to go 9-4 in their final 13 games just to secure a Wild Card spot. 

There have been a few eventual division winners who have started seasons 1-3, but that path usually requires more luck (weak division, easy schedule, etc.). A 1-3 isn’t a killer, but good teams usually don’t start the season off that slow.

Plenty of Volatility in the Early Stages of An NFL Season

There is a lot of randomness that happens in the first few weeks of the NFL season, as there are usually a few outcomes that don’t make any sense. A perfect example from the 2025 season would be the Patriots losing at home to the Raiders in Week 1.

The Patriots finished the year with a record of 14-3 and made it to the Super Bowl, while the Raiders finished 3-14 and with their third win coming in Week 18 against the Kansas City Chiefs without their top two QBs. We can expect some flukiness early in the season, but it’s very rare that a Super Bowl-caliber team will start the season off (that) slow.

And this is why we love the NFL so much. Every game truly does matter, and because there are only 17 games each year, every win and loss can feel so impactful. 

So now that we are through the first month of the 2026 season, who do you think should be the Super Bowl favorite, based on what we’ve seen in the first four games? The trends show that it’ll likely be one of the teams that started 3-1 or 4-0. 

Let that be your tip when placing Super Bowl futures bets.