Early 2026 NFL trends: Teams among all-time best, worst - ESPN

Early in every NFL season, you hear a lot about the pace of certain stats. But most of the time when you see that a player or team is on pace to record a certain stat, you have no idea about issues for similar things in the past.

Performance is usually going to regress toward the mean. Teams and players that started superhot will cool. Teams and players that were terrible early will get better. So we don't want to compare a team's performance after four games to what other teams have done over 16- and 17-game seasons. We want to compare that performance to what others have done in the same number of games.

We can do that with DVOA (defense-adjusted value over average) stats. We've gone back and rerun every season since 1977 to see what DVOA would have looked like as of Week 4. Here, teams are rated solely based on what they did through four games (and what opponents did over that time). And every year of DVOA is normalized so that we're comparing teams to the averages of their own era, not to what teams do in today's game.

This year, there's one team in particular playing at a historical level. You might not realize quite how good the San Francisco 49ers have been. But will their usual spate of injuries prevent them from living up to their September greatness with the franchise's sixth Super Bowl title? Let's look closer and explore three other early trends that I've noticed in the DVOA data.

The 49ers shocked everyone when they not only beat the favored Rams in Week 1 but destroyed them. We've sort of written off that Rams performance because of the whole jetlag issue, but maybe a part of the 49ers winning was being really good?

San Francisco has continued to win games, mostly decisively. It dominated the Dolphins in