Hey, I’m not sure if you’ve heard the news, but the Houston Texans, on the heels of preseason Super Bowl aspirations, have started the season 0-2. In some ways, it’s the most painful kind of 0-2 start, in that the Texans are (a) a team with high expectations, and (b) close losses to good teams in each of those games, a 14-9 loss to the Rams in Week 1 and a 20-19 loss to the Buccaneers on Monday night.
If Dare Ogunbowale doesn’t fumble away the football against the Rams late in the fourth quarter, the Texans possibly win that game. If Henry To’o To’o tackles Baker Mayfield on 4th and 10, instead of sailing past him like a drunken maniac, the Texans close out the Bucs and win 19-14 on Monday. As poorly as the Texans have played offensively (lowest scoring team in the NFL through two weeks), they probably should have won both games.
Alas, “should have” has all the worth of a Nick Caley play call at the opposing one yard line in the world of the NFL. The Texans are 0-2, and that’s that. So what does it mean? Well, you’ll be seeing plenty of stats over the next few days on the near death blow that an 0-2 start portends for a team’s playoff chances. The two biggest ones, for me:
* From 1990 through 2023, only 11.5 percent of the teams to start a season 0-2 have gone on to make the postseason.
* Since the playoff field expanded from 12 teams to 14 teams in 2020, only 5 of the 43 teams to start a season 0-2 have made the playoffs, 11.6 percent.
So, on the surface, these last nine days have been a rock hard body blow to the Texans chances of achieving the “new heights” hoped for by DeMeco Ryans. Ryans wants to get to an AFC title game, but the problem is that you have to actually make the playoffs to do that.
This is the ninth time in Texans history that the team has started 0-2 to begin the season. Here is the definitive list of Texans 0-2 seasons (playoff years in BOLD)
2004: finished 7-9
2005: finished 2-14
2006: finished 6-10
2008: finished 8-8
2015: finished 9-7
2018: finished 11-52020: finished 4-12
2023: finished 10-7
So if you’re looking for a silver lining in this painful slog of a 2025 season thus far, just know that, while the rest of the NFL is barely cracking 11 percent on making the playoffs after an 0-2 start, the Texans are smacking a robust 37.5 percent batting average, including making the playoffs three of the last four times an 0-2 start has occurred.
Does that make you feel any better? (I didn’t think so.)
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