Every NFL Winless Season: The Complete List
Nine NFL teams have finished a season without a single win since 1940, and two of them went 0-16 rather than one. Detroit did it in 2008 and Cleveland did it in 2017, which means the frequently asked question “what was the only team to go 0-16?” has been wrong since December 31, 2017.
That is the first thing to get straight, because the rest of the list depends on a distinction most rundowns skip: a winless season and an 0-16 season are not the same record. Two of the nine finished winless with a tie on the ledger, and four of them played schedules that were never 16 games long to begin with.
Every winless NFL season since 1940
| Season | Team | Record | Games | Context |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1942 | Detroit Lions | 0-11 | 11 | First WWII season; scored 38 points all year |
| 1943 | Chicago Cardinals | 0-10 | 10 | Start of a 29-game losing streak |
| 1944 | Brooklyn Tigers | 0-10 | 10 | Merged with Boston the following year |
| 1944 | Card-Pitt | 0-10 | 10 | Cardinals and Steelers combined into one team |
| 1960 | Dallas Cowboys | 0-11-1 | 12 | Expansion season; tied the Giants 31-31 |
| 1976 | Tampa Bay Buccaneers | 0-14 | 14 | Expansion season; worst point margin since the merger |
| 1982 | Baltimore Colts | 0-8-1 | 9 | Strike-shortened season |
| 2008 | Detroit Lions | 0-16 | 16 | First 0-16 in league history |
| 2017 | Cleveland Browns | 0-16 | 16 | Second, and most recent |
The 1920s and early 1930s produced winless teams regularly, but the league’s membership churned so heavily in that era — franchises appeared, played a handful of games and folded, sometimes mid-season — that those records don’t compare cleanly to anything after. The 1923 Oorang Indians went 0-6 and dissolved. The 1934 Cincinnati Reds went 0-8 and were taken over by the St. Louis Gunners partway through the year.
What was the only NFL team to go 0-16?
There isn’t one. There are two.
2008 Detroit Lions. Rod Marinelli’s team lost all 16, was outscored 517-268, and started three quarterbacks: Jon Kitna (four starts), Dan Orlovsky (seven) and Daunte Culpepper (five). The full breakdown is in our anatomy of the 2008 Lions’ 0-16 season.
2017 Cleveland Browns. Hue Jackson’s team lost all 16 the other way — less catastrophically, and more narrowly. Cleveland scored 234 points and allowed 410, a margin of minus-176 against Detroit’s minus-249. Their closest loss was a 12-9 overtime defeat to Tennessee in Week 7. Rookie DeShone Kizer took the majority of the starts, with Kevin Hogan and Cody Kessler splitting the rest.
Cleveland’s 0-16 is also the tail end of the worse two-year run: the Browns went 1-15 in 2016 and 0-16 in 2017, a combined 1-31.
The 1976 Buccaneers are the worst of the nine
If you rank winless teams by how badly they were beaten rather than by how many times, Tampa Bay’s expansion year is not close.
| Team | Record | Points for | Points against | Margin | Per game |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1976 Buccaneers | 0-14 | 125 | 412 | -287 | -20.5 |
| 2008 Lions | 0-16 | 268 | 517 | -249 | -15.6 |
| 1942 Lions | 0-11 | 38 | 263 | -225 | -20.5 |
| 2017 Browns | 0-16 | 234 | 410 | -176 | -11.0 |
Minus-287 is still the worst point differential of any NFL team since the AFL-NFL merger. John McKay’s roster scored fewer than nine points a game and was shut out five separate times, including a 42-0 loss to Pittsburgh.
The 1942 Lions match Tampa Bay’s per-game margin in a lower-scoring era, which arguably makes them the more extreme outlier. Thirty-eight points across eleven games is 3.5 points a game. They were shut out five times and never scored more than seven in a game all season.
The losing streaks that outlasted the seasons
Winless seasons rarely stay contained inside one calendar year, and the two longest streaks in NFL history both run through one.
The Chicago Cardinals lost 29 consecutive games from 1942 into 1945 — the final six of 1942, all ten of 1943, all ten of the 1944 Card-Pitt season, and the first three of 1945. ESPN and most reference sources credit that run to the Cardinals as the longest losing streak in league history, though it depends on counting the merged Card-Pitt games as Cardinals games. The streak ended on October 14, 1945, with a 16-7 win over the Bears at Wrigley Field.
Tampa Bay’s 26 straight is the longest by a single unmerged franchise and the longest of the modern era: 0-14 in 1976, then the first 12 games of 1977. It ended on December 11, 1977, with a 33-14 road win at New Orleans in which the Buccaneers returned three interceptions for touchdowns.
Detroit’s 2008 season sits inside a 19-game streak that started with the 2007 finale and ended in Week 3 of 2009, when Matthew Stafford beat Washington 19-14.
Why winless seasons cluster and perfect seasons don’t
Nine winless teams since 1940. One perfect season in the same span, and that team, the 1972 Dolphins, still hasn’t been joined. The asymmetry isn’t a coincidence.
A team good enough to win every game has to be at the extreme right edge of the talent distribution and then stay healthy and lucky through the whole schedule. A team bad enough to lose every game only has to be at the left edge — and the left edge is a much easier place to end up, because the mechanisms that put you there (a gutted roster, a collapsed franchise, a war, a strike, an expansion draft that hands you other teams’ castoffs) are structural rather than a matter of luck running out.
That is the same math from the other side of the real odds of going 17-0. The list of teams that got close is in our rundown of NFL teams that almost went undefeated; it is longer than the winless list, and none of them finished the job.
Want to find out which side of that distribution your roster lands on? Build a team and play a full season here.
Frequently asked questions
Do ties count as a winless season?+
Yes, by the standard definition — a winless season means zero wins, regardless of ties. The 1960 Cowboys (0-11-1) and 1982 Colts (0-8-1) both finished winless without going 0-for-everything. Before 1972 the NFL ignored ties entirely when calculating winning percentage, so Dallas was officially credited with a .000 percentage that year rather than .042.
Which winless team was the worst by points?+
The 1976 Buccaneers, at minus-287 across 14 games. That remains the worst point differential of any NFL team since the AFL-NFL merger. They scored 125 points all year and were shut out five times.
Has an expansion team ever gone winless in its first year?+
Twice. The 1960 Dallas Cowboys went 0-11-1 and the 1976 Tampa Bay Buccaneers went 0-14. Modern expansion rules give new teams far more usable talent than either of those rosters received, which is a large part of why it hasn't happened since.
Why were there so many winless teams in the 1940s?+
World War II. Rosters were stripped by military service to the point that the Chicago Cardinals and Pittsburgh Steelers merged into a single team, Card-Pitt, for the 1944 season — and that merged team still went 0-10. The 1942 Lions scored 38 points across an entire 11-game schedule.
Could a team go winless in a 17-game season?+
It is possible and has not happened. The NFL expanded to 17 games in 2021 and no team has finished worse than 2-15 since. Adding a 17th game makes a winless year marginally harder to complete while making the loss total, if it ever happens, one worse than the current record.