The truth about stats is they can point a handicapper in a number of different directions. For example, if a National Football League team closes out the prior season with four or more wins over the final five weeks one might consider those numbers pointing to a successful campaign the following season.

Wrong.

My nephew Paul, who has worked with me since the inception of Qoxhi in 1981, initially stuffing envelopes in the office while in grade school, discovered something while working on his degree at the University of California. Teams that finish a season with at least four consecutive wins and fail to make the playoffs routinely have a worst win/loss record the next season.

Why?

It can be deduced that a team that finished with a flurry of victories and still weren’t good enough to crack the playoff field probably had a very bad record before their late season surge. Which means this, they are prime candidates to have expectations exceed actual talent levels.

One team that finished the 2025 season with four straight wins and still missed the playoffs was the Atlanta Falcons. By Paul’s rule, the Falcons record this season will be below their eight wins earned last year. This prognostication runs smack into a team that has a lot of excitement from their fan base for a couple very good reasons.

First, they are still looking for their first round, eighth overall, 2024 draft choice of quarterback Michael Penix Jr to develop into the franchise quarterback they were counting on when they selected him. He has had mixed reviews for a couple obvious reasons in his first two pro seasons. He has missed half of the games the Falcons have played over the past two years due to injuries and spotty play. He has a career record of four wins and eight losses as a starter.

Penix’s quarterback ranking is 84.5 while he has tossed twice as many touchdowns as interceptions, 12-6.

If he avoids injuries and plays as well as his backups, the starting job is his. Teams normally put a premium on first round picks to prove their drafting room right.

This year, the Falcons also have a chase of proving the Miami Dolphins were both right and wrong. They also had the quarterback they were hoping would be their franchise leader for a decade or more when they took Alabama QB Tua Tagovailoa while Justin Herbert was still available in the 2020 draft.

Like Penix, Tagovailoa has been hampered in his pro career with injuries. He missed 23 starts for the Dolphins with both head and body injuries. Still, when he did start, I think the Dolphins fans that were booing him at Hard Rock Stadium might be surprised that he also had a touchdown to interception ratio of more than two to one, with 120 TDs and 59 picks in his six seasons in Miami.

The Dolphins have often been criticized for selecting Tua over Herbert, and while the Los Angeles Chargers seem to have more success with Herbert than the Dolphins did with Tua, neither of those top 2020 draft choices are yet to lead their team to a postseason win.

Still, the stats indicate that Tagovailoa has credentials that belie his lack of appreciation, which include a career 96.4 quarterback ranking. For the record, the Chargers Herbert has a career passer rating of 94.1 and one of the QB’s recognized among the best in football today, Matthew Stafford of the Los Angeles Rams, has a 92.4 career passer rating.

If we are looking at the standard barrier of all things good for a quarterback, that would be Tom Brady, he concluded his career with a 97.2 passer rating.

So, see, stats can point in all sorts of directions. But what Paul found was that a team that comes off a winning run without a postseason berth is a prime candidate for a worst record the next season. Which reduces all the optimism in Atlanta to a season with only seven wins or less.

Go figure.