Pro Football Reference Blog

A few days ago I told you about the 49ers' run of 285 straight games without a three-game losing streak. It lasted from week 1 of 1981 until week 7 of 1999.

During that time, San Francisco went 210-74-1, for a winning percentage of .739. Suppose you had a coin that came up heads 73.9 percent of the time. If you flipped it 285 times, what are the chances that you'd see a run of three straight tails in there at some point? About 98.4%, it turns out.

Football teams are not coins, of course. I'm not sure if the things that make football teams different from coins would generally make streaks more likely or less likely. On the one hand, there is some artificial balancing created by the schedule. Teams rarely play more than two consecutive games on the road or at home, for instance. On the other hand, if you believe in teams getting hot or going through slumps, then that would make football teams more prone to streaks than coins are. Even if you don't believe in those things, injuries probably make teams streakier than coins. In any event, I'm convinced that 1.6% is a decent estimate of a team's chances of putting together a run like that, given that they're as good as the 1981--1999 Niners.

So, while unlikely, it's not that crazy that the 49ers, as good as they were during that stretch, never lost three straight. No, the crazy part is that they were that good for that long. Take a look at the records of the other NFL franchises during that same period of time.

TM     Record       PCT

========================

sfo   210- 74-1    0.739

mia   175-108-1    0.618

den   174-110-1    0.612

was   164-119-1    0.579

jax    40- 30-0    0.571

dal   162-122-0    0.570

pit   158-127-0    0.554

nyg   156-127-2    0.551

chi   155-130-0    0.544

oak   155-130-0    0.544

min   155-130-0    0.544

kan   153-129-2    0.542

buf   153-132-0    0.537

gnb   147-135-2    0.521

phi   140-142-3    0.496

sea   138-146-0    0.486

nor   135-149-0    0.475

cle   111-125-1    0.470

car    32- 37-0    0.464

nwe   132-153-0    0.463

sdg   130-154-0    0.458

ten   130-155-0    0.456

nyj   127-156-2    0.449

det   125-158-1    0.442

stl   125-159-0    0.440

cin   123-162-0    0.432

atl   112-172-1    0.395

ari   111-172-2    0.393

ind   102-181-1    0.361

bal    18- 34-1    0.349

tam    97-187-0    0.342

The difference betwen San Francisco and #2 is bigger than the difference between #2 and #15. They were nearly two wins per year better than anybody else for an 18-year period.