There was a time that if you started 0-2 your season was over. Good teams can lose back-to-back games at midseason and it isn’t life or death. But the playoff odds for teams starting off 0-2 drop hard.
The additional regular-season game and third wild-card team in each conference makes overcoming an 0-2 start more manageable. But if you start 0-3? That’s trouble no matter how you slice it.
Coming into Week 3, a lot of teams are on the edge of that 0-3 cliff, including 2022 playoff teams (Bengals, Vikings and Chargers) and a couple that thought they had legitimate playoff chances (Patriots and Broncos). These teams are going to be more desperate than most because the hole they’ve dug is already deep and getting a lot deeper with a third straight loss.
