Three teams spent most of Week 4 staring straight at 1-3. None of them finished it there. The NFL Week 4 comebacks belonged to the Rams, the Cowboys and the Patriots, and all three now sit at 2-2 with a season that still has a shape to it instead of a season that needs a eulogy.
That is the whole story in one sentence, and it is also the thing people will underrate by Wednesday. Two and two is not a résumé. It is a door that stayed open. In a league where the standings are mostly tiebreakers wearing a disguise, the difference between 2-2 and 1-3 in early October is not one game. It is the difference between playing your season and playing somebody else's.
What happened in the NFL Week 4 comebacks
The common thread is the part that should interest you more than the highlights. Three different rosters, three different coaching staffs, three different sets of problems, and all three found a way to win a game they had spent three quarters losing. That is not a scheme trait. That is a team trait, and it is the one trait you cannot install in training camp.
I do not have the full play-by-play from every one of those finishes on my desk yet, so I am not going to pretend otherwise and narrate drives I have not watched twice. What I do have is the Dallas file, and the Dallas file tells the story the other two are living.
How the Cowboys flipped the script against the Texans
A week earlier, everything that could go wrong late against Baltimore did. The Cowboys had the end of that game in their hands and it got away, and if you have followed this franchise for any length of time you know exactly how that week sounded from the outside. Then Sunday came, Houston was in the building, and Dallas put together a winning drive instead of a collapse.
Same team. Same closing minutes. Opposite result. That is the part the league is built on and the part nobody can project in August.
There is also a scheduling wrinkle that matters here, and it is not a small one. The Cowboys turn right around and host Tampa Bay on Thursday night, October 8. A short week after an emotional finish is where good feelings go to get tested. Bodies do not recover on a narrative timeline. They recover on a calendar, and the calendar just handed Dallas three days.
The 1-3 hole, and who has actually climbed out of it
Here is why all three fan bases should exhale and then immediately stop exhaling. A 1-3 start is historically a bad place to live. It is not a death sentence, but the list of teams that dug out of it and did something real in January is short enough that everybody can name the same few examples.
checked the almanac: the 2001 patriots opened 1-3, lost drew bledsoe along the way, handed the job to a sixth-round kid, and finished the year holding the lombardi trophy. the 1993 cowboys started 0-2 without emmitt smith and won the super bowl anyway. the 2007 giants lost their first two and went on the road three straight times in january.
So it happens. It happens roughly as often as an eclipse. The point of those teams is not that a bad start is fine. The point is that all of them had something underneath the record that the record was hiding. These three may or may not. Four games is still four games, and I am not handing out identities in the first week of October.
| Team | Record now | Record with a Week 4 loss | Win-column swing |
|---|---|---|---|
| Los Angeles Rams | 2-2 | 1-3 | 1 |
| Dallas Cowboys | 2-2 | 1-3 | 1 |
| New England Patriots | 2-2 | 1-3 | 1 |
| Cleveland Browns (for contrast) | 3-1 | 2-2 | 1 |
That last row is in there on purpose. Cleveland knocked off Pittsburgh 27-24 and is sitting at 3-1, which was not on many preseason bingo cards, and the AFC North suddenly looks nothing like the division people drew in July. One game moves a team from curiosity to contender in the conversation. One game moved three other teams from obituary to open question. Same single game, wildly different stories, and that is the sport.
October is the attrition month
While those three were saving their seasons, the rest of the league was losing pieces of its own. The injury news around Week 4 and into Week 5 reads like a rough morning: Travis Etienne, Justin Jefferson and Brian Burns all sidelined, linebacker Edgerrin Cooper out with an Achilles, and a run of non-contact injuries that has people around the league asking uncomfortable questions about workload and surfaces.
In Denver, Patrick Surtain II is expected to avoid long-term damage after a non-contact ankle injury, with more testing to come. In Kansas City, Rashee Rice and Tyquan Thornton are both facing time away, and the reporting says the Chiefs have stayed in contact with Tyreek Hill as a free agent. File that one as reported, not done. The league is also reviewing a pair of incidents involving officials and players, including language directed at Trey McBride and a heated exchange after a collision with Eric Wilson, which is its own separate conversation and one the competition committee will be hearing about in the spring.
I bring all of that up because it frames what the Rams, Cowboys and Patriots actually bought themselves on Sunday. They bought margin. In a season where the roster you finish with will barely resemble the one you started with, margin is the only real currency. A team at 2-2 can absorb a月 of bad luck. A team at 1-3 cannot absorb anything.
What to watch next
Three things on my notebook page.
First, Dallas on a short week. Thursday night against Tampa Bay is the honest test of whether Sunday's finish was a turning point or a nice afternoon. Teams that just climbed off the mat and then get three days to recover tend to tell you the truth about their depth in a hurry.
Second, the Rams and the Patriots in their next time out. The comeback is the easy part to feel good about. The follow-up is the part that separates a resilient team from a sloppy team that got lucky once. Watch how each of them starts, not how they finish. Teams that keep needing fourth-quarter heroics are usually teams with a first-quarter problem.
Third, tonight in New Orleans. Atlanta at the Saints at 8:15 ET, and the week has been full of people revisiting Steve Gleason's blocked punt from the Superdome's reopening twenty years ago. That is not a storyline. That is a reminder of why anybody cares about any of this in the first place. Bijan Robinson has been the best version of himself under the lights, and primetime in that building has a way of being louder than the stat sheet.
Three seasons that could have been filed away got handed another month instead. That is what Week 4 did. What they do with it starts Thursday.