Last week, I evaluated the NFL's 0-2 teams and tried to figure out which of them had the best shot of making it to the postseason. Let's change gears and look at the most successful teams in football.
The league has seven 3-0 teams after the Rams won on Sunday night, and they should all feel good about their playoff chances. Since 2002, just under 70% of the teams that started 3-0 were able to parlay their early-season success into postseason football.
Instead of trying to identify the teams that are most likely to miss out on playoff football, though, I want to go in a different direction. Even though we've only had three weeks of action, I've seen enough in some cases to challenge -- or flat-out reject -- the notions I held heading into the season. Players and teams who I thought might start slowly or struggle have impressed. In other cases, I feel more confident about the ideas I held heading into the campaign.
So, for each of the seven 3-0 teams, I've gone through and identified something that has surprised me and another thing that hasn't really been shocking through three games. (There's one exception below.) I've sorted through these teams from the most surprising 3-0 start to the league's least surprising, which means this list begins and ends in the same division:
Most people should realize by now that the Bills have a good defense, but that has undersold the story for a while. In 2017, Sean McDermott took over what had been the league's 27th-ranked defense by DVOA under Rex Ryan and immediately pushed it to 15th. While the Bills failed to return to the playoffs and took a step backward in 2018, the defense wasn't the problem. Leslie Frazier's defense allowed 47 points to the Ravens in last year's season opener and then 31 points to the Chargers in a game most famous for Vontae Davis retiring at halftime, but the Bills have been a dominant defense ever since.
Consider that even with those two dismal games to start the season, the Bills finished second in DVOA last season, ahead of well-regarded powerhouses like the Ravens and Vikings and only behind the Bears, who were a takeaway factory in 2018. Over their last 17 games -- from Week 3 of 2018 on -- here's where the Bills rank in a few key defensive rate statistics:
Buffalo's Dominant Defense
No unit has things harder than the Bills' defense, which faces a ton of drives and inherits terrible starting field position from an offense that turns over the ball too frequently. The Bills have gone up against 29 drives beginning on their own side of the field, almost always after an offensive takeaway. To contrast, the Patriots -- who rank just ahead of the Bills in points allowed per drive -- have faced 14 such drives over that time frame. The Chiefs have faced just five.
To be right up there with the likes of the Bears and Patriots is downright magical. We saw another example of Buffalo's efforts on Sunday, when it held the Bengals to six punts and three turnovers on their first nine drives. If we define short fields as drives beginning with 65 yards or less to go for a touchdown, the Bills faced four short possessions Sunday. They allowed a total of seven points on those four drives, with those coming after a Josh Allen interception gave the Bengals the ball on Buffalo's 22-yard line. (One of those possessions, to be fair, came with two seconds left at the end of the first half.) The Bills sealed the victory with Tre'Davious White's second interception of the day, which matched his total from 2018. While the best cornerback in football discussion often includes some combination of Jalen Ramsey and former Bills star Stephon Gilmore, White absolutely belongs there. His second interception involved catching a deflection, but both picks required incredible hands.
White's takeaway numbers aren't staggering because opposing offenses know he's a star and stay away. He has been targeted just 14.1% of the time since the start of 2018, per the NFL's Next Gen Stats; only Richard Sherman, Casey Hayward, and William Jackson have been targeted less frequently by opposing quarterbacks. McDermott has also been able to use White as a press corner on nearly 47% of his targets, which is remarkable for a corner who is listed at 5-foot-11 and 176 pounds. Only seven other corners in the league were in press coverage more frequently on their targets.