You’re wrong, Ron Rivera. It is important how you start.

Now well into the third season of Ron Rivera’s rebuild, we’re all quite familiar with his platitudes, clichés, and rhetorical crutches. He has a habit of going back to well-worn chestnuts, especially when the going gets rough, and one phrase, in particular, has annoyed me since the first time I heard him utter it.

To me, it sounded like an excuse for losing, or being underprepared, early on, in an effort to keep fans and other interested parties hanging on in the hope that - eventually - this head coach who has had three winning seasons in his eleven years in the league would turn things around.

That said, one can understand the superficial appeal. After all, it has a folksy “tortoise and the hare” charm to it. We all know, “slow and steady wins the race”, right? Right? Turns out the logic of the NFL isn’t quite the same as Aesop’s fables.

It’s gotten to the point where even outsiders have begun to take notice of this linguistic silliness:

Each September, we’re deluged with statistics about how few 0-2 or 0-3 teams make the playoffs, and probabilistically speaking, getting into an early hole seriously dampens a team chances. Meanwhile, a quick start to the season very often puts teams in a great spot to play extra frames.

So, as most would suspect, it does, in fact, matter “how you start.” But was this something that Ron had just contrived to buy more breathing room in Washington as he hit a rough patch?

No, alarmingly, it turns out that Coach Rivera has been peddling this nonsense for at least a decade, well back into his time with the Panthers.

Having discovered the ancestral roots of Ron’s sentiments, I decided to go back and take a look at his coaching performances, throughout his career, over the first four games of the season. The results of that analysis are below:

2011: 1-3 (0-2 start)

2012: 1-3 (1-1 start)

2013: 1-3 (0-2 start; made playoffs)

2014: 2-2 (2-0 start; made playoffs at 7-8-1)

2015: 4-0 (2-0 start; made playoffs)

2016: 1-3 (1-1 start)

2017: 3-1 (2-0 start; made playoffs)

2018: 3-1 (1-1 start)

2019: 2-2 (0-2 start)

How about in Washington?

2020: 1-3 (1-1 start; made playoffs at 7-9)

2021: 2-2 (1-1 start)

2022: 1-3 (1-1 start)

So, apart from the outlier seasons of 2013 and 2020, where the Panthers ultimately finished 12-4 and Washington snuck into the playoffs at 7-9, respectively, a strong start has almost always presaged a playoff birth, while a weak one has killed playoff chances before the team has gotten to Halloween.

In his twelve seasons coaching, through his first four games, Rivera has posted a 1-3 record six times, a 2-2 record three times, and a 3-1 or better record three times. In 50% of his coaching career, his teams have started off in a hole. Only 25% of the time have they finished the first quarter* of the season with a winning record. Not surprisingly, when they did that, they usually made the playoffs.

It turns out, one of the reasons that Ron’s teams may have slow starts to their seasons is because they’ve tended to have slow starts to their games:

So, Ron, enough of the rationalization of slow starts. Recognize that starting games and seasons strong is one of the single-best indicators of longer term success.

Stop coddling your team, your coaches, and the fans and start delivering early, or you’ll no longer have people listening to your message by the time you limp into the offseason.