Sports Reference Blog

Pro-Football-Reference Introduces The Team Record Finder

Posted by Alex Bonilla on August 9, 2018

In an inevitability, your team gets off to a rocky start by dropping its first four games of the season. NFL media members will then leap to giving you some morsel of hope by telling you, "Wait, this 0-4 team made the playoffs, so don't panic!"

Well, now you can find this kind of information on your own with Pro-Football-Reference's Team Record Finder, the latest addition to our ever-expanding Play Index. With this tool, you can input any record that a team may have had at some point in their season, and then see the final record of every team that was in that situation.

Using the previously mentioned example, here is a list of the 91 teams since 1990 (when the 12-team playoff system began) that started 0-4 and their final records. Along with a full list, the Team Record Finder gives you a nice summary including a team's average finish (4-12 if you started 0-4) and the percentage of teams who made the playoffs (1.1% of 0-4 teams managed to accomplish that). For teams that did make the playoffs, we also include how far they got; we can see that the only 0-4 team to make the playoffs was the 1992 San Diego Chargers, who finished the regular season with 11 wins and won their wild card game before falling in the divisional round to the Miami Dolphins.

If you have any questions or suggestions, feel free to contact us through our feedback form.

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This entry was posted on Thursday, August 9th, 2018 at 8:40 am and is filed under Announcement, Data, Features, History, Play Index, Pro-Football-Reference.com. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

4 Responses to “Pro-Football-Reference Introduces The Team Record Finder”

  1. Jason Winter Says: August 9th, 2018 at 10:06 am

    Nice feature! I think I found a bug, though. When searching for 9-7 teams, I get this in the results:

    Best Finish: 9-6, 2 teams (most recent: 1987 Seahawks).

    Worst Finish: 8-7, 1987 Vikings

    Obviously, I can exclude strike seasons, but it seems like I shouldn't have to do so to exclude these teams. Searching with that box checked also provides me with different percentages.

  2. Alex Bonilla Says: August 9th, 2018 at 11:41 am

    Thanks for pointing that out, we just got that fixed up.

  3. dave d Says: August 12th, 2018 at 10:04 am

    For 2017 it says 17 teams started 1-0. If there are 32 teams and you can't have 2 winners in a game, how can you have 17 winners? It should just be 16

    http://pfref.com/tiny/8NuDX

  4. Mark Growcott Says: August 13th, 2018 at 1:54 am

    There were only 15 games in Week 1 last season due to the TB @ MIA game being postponed to Week 11 due to Hurricane Irma. Both teams won their opening game in Week 2 and thus 17 teams started 1-0.