Last Season’s Record Is a Liar

Every spring, the NFL releases its schedule and the hot-take machine kicks into overdrive. Fans, analysts, talking heads and fantasy gurus crack open the previous season’s standings like they’re reading tea leaves, projecting strength of schedule as if the league is a spreadsheet and not a living, breathing organism that reinvents itself every single year. It isn’t. The teams you saw last December are not the teams you’ll see next September. They seldom are.

The truth be told, last year’s record is one of the least reliable predictors of next year’s performance in professional sports. The NFL has been proving this, repeatedly and relentlessly. Yet sometimes, we can’t resist the urge to put the Ravens down for 12-5 and the AFC North title when it’s only August. We do it here at RSR every season with our Bold Predictions that quickly look like they were completed by blindfolded chimps with a dartboard. I suppose it provides for a good barstool conversation amongst friends, but really nothing more.

Let’s take a little walk down the halls of NFL history to reveal the worts in seasonal predictions.

The Floor Has No Ceiling

May we start with the obvious — the worst teams. The conventional wisdom says they stay bad. History says otherwise.

In 1998, the St. Louis Rams were a 4-12 disaster with a quarterback nobody cared about and a star receiver who missed most of the season. The following year? Kurt Warner amassed 4,353 passing yards and 41 touchdowns, taking home league MVP honors. Marshall Faulk topped 1,300 yards on the ground and 1,000 as a receiver and the Rams went 13-3 — one of the most stunning single-season reversals in NFL history — and won the Super Bowl. One offseason. One roster shuffle. One healthy Isaac Bruce and one new trade for a Hall of Fame back. That’s all it took to go from the NFL’s basement to its penthouse.

The 2008 Miami Dolphins tell a similar story. In 2007, they went 1-15 under Cam Cameron in one of the more hapless seasons anyone can remember. The Fins only win that season was at the expense of the Brian Billick led Ravens. The Dolphins’ 11-5 record in 2008 was the greatest turnaround in NFL history, the first season with Bill Parcells as executive vice president of football operations, Jeff Ireland as general manager, and Tony Sparano as head coach. A ten-win swing. Ten. Games. Because the people running the building changed, the roster changed, and the culture changed.

Then there’s the 2009 New Orleans Saints — arguably the gold standard of NFL bounce-back arcs. Drew Brees and the Saints exploded in 2009, jumping out to a franchise-best 13-0 record — and oddly enough, they did so with a marginally improved defense and, from a personnel standpoint, a nearly identical offense. Same players. Different result. That’s the NFL.

Four worst-to-first teams have ultimately won the Super Bowl: the 1999 St. Louis Rams, the 2001 New England Patriots, the 2009 New Orleans Saints, and the 2017 Philadelphia Eagles. Four champions, each of whom had been sitting in the divisional cellar just twelve months prior. Schedule makers who projected those teams as cupcakes based on prior-year records handed opposing offenses gift-wrapped early-season confidence — and paid the price for it.

The Ceiling Has No Floor Either

Now let’s flip the script. Because if last year’s bad teams can shock the world, last year’s champions can break your heart just as fast.

The 2021 Los Angeles Rams won the Super Bowl. Twelve months later? The Rams fell from 12-5 — a team that employed Von Miller and Odell Beckham Jr. and saw Matthew Stafford outduel Tom Brady and Joe Burrow in the playoffs — to 5-12, as a battered offensive line helped sideline Stafford. That’s a seven-win collapse for a team that had been celebrated as an all-in roster construction masterpiece. Stafford’s injuries, cap consequences from aggressive roster moves, and the physical regression that follows a deep playoff run all conspired to turn a champion into a pretender in the span of a single offseason.

John Elway‘s retirement produced a similarly jarring drop. The Broncos went from two straight championships in 1997 and 1998 to a 6-10 record in 1999. Fourteen wins to six. In one year. Because one player — one transcendent player — hung up his cleats.

The pattern is relentless. Greatness in the NFL is contextual, fragile, and deeply dependent on factors that change every single offseason. This is not a new development.

Why the Schedule Predictors Keep Getting It Wrong

The NFL’s schedule-strength model — which assigns difficulty based on opponents’ prior-year records — is a flawed instrument that the league itself has acknowledged in the past. Beginning with the 1978 season, NFL schedule makers began creating the regular season schedule with a team’s divisional ranking from the previous season in mind. As a result, last-place divisional finishers play a “last-place schedule,” which can positively impact their ability to improve their record.

In other words, the NFL actively tries to engineer parity through scheduling — rewarding bad teams with easier opponents and taxing good teams with harder ones. The system is designed to create balance but oftentimes the result is volatility. Yet every March, the schedule makers employ the same formulas, attempt to draw straight lines from the previous year’s standings only to watch the next season take on a mind and journey of its own.

Players age. Quarterbacks get hurt. Coordinators get poached. Salary caps force impossible choices. A cornerback who was elite in Year One of his contract hits the wall in Year Four. A running back who ran for 1,400 yards last season is tackled by Father Time and finishes with half that total. The NFL is not a static document. It is a relentlessly evolving competition where rosters turn over at a rate that would make corporate executives’ heads spin in other industries.

Let History be Your Guide

A look at bottom-three NFL records from 2000 to 2024 found that the average increase in wins for those bottom-dwelling teams the following season was 3.5 wins — but with enormous dispersion. Fourteen teams actually stayed flat or declined further, while others made dramatic leaps. That dispersion is the story. The average hides the chaos.

Projecting a schedule as “easy” because you’re playing last year’s 5-12 teams, or “brutal” because you drew last year’s AFC North is a fundamentally unreliable exercise. The 2001 New England Patriots went 5-11 in Drew Bledsoe‘s final full season. Then Tom Brady took over and they won the Super Bowl. The 2003 Carolina Panthers improved from 7-9 to 11-5 and reached the Super Bowl on the strength of a quarterback nobody knew was coming. Remember Jake Delhomme?

To borrow from Ray Lewis, bottom line, the standings from last January are merely a postcard from a place that no longer exists except in history books.

So when you hear the noise about strength of schedule and how rugged a stretch of games appear today, be mindful that teams taking the field in Week 1 will be different in ways both visible and invisible. Plan accordingly — or be surprised.

In the NFL, it’s almost always both.

Stats and historical records sourced from Pro Football Reference and NFL.com.

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Source: https://russellstreetreport.com/2026/07/04/lombardis-way/nfl-schedule-predictions/