How early can you spot a top-five pick? What 14 years of preseason expectations show

By Guaranteed Sport Picks

Draft season starts earlier every year. By late September, some fan bases are already scouting quarterbacks for a pick their team hasn’t earned yet. We wanted to know how much of the top of the draft order you can see coming before a single game is played.

So we pulled the preseason win total for every team from 2012 through 2025, as archived by Pro Football Reference, and matched each one against the final record. That covers 14 seasons and 448 team-seasons.

A bottom-five finish here means one of the five worst records in the league, the teams that earn the top five draft slots before any trades. Ties at the cutoff count, which gives us 85 bottom-five finishes to work with.

The teams everyone expects to be bad usually are

A preseason win total of 5 or lower is rare. Only 18 teams got one in 14 years. Thirteen of them finished with a bottom-five record, which works out to 72%.

One step up, the hit rate falls off quickly. Teams projected for 5.5 to 6.5 wins landed in the bottom five 38% of the time, and it keeps dropping from there.

Preseason win total	Teams	Bottom-five finishes	Rate
5 or lower	18	13	72%
5.5 to 6.5	77	29	38%
7 to 8	105	22	21%
8.5 to 9.5	155	15	10%
10 or higher	93	6	6%

Preseason win totals and final records, 2012 through 2025, via Pro Football Reference. Ties for the fifth-worst record are counted.

Put another way, about half of the 85 bottom-five teams (42) were projected for 6.5 wins or fewer. Those are the ones you could see coming in August.

The worst record is much harder to call

Being bad and being the worst are different things. In these 14 seasons, the team with the lowest preseason total finished with the worst record outright only twice: the 2016 Browns and the 2020 Jaguars, who both went 1-15. Two others, the 2012 Jaguars and 2015 Titans, tied for it.

The rest of the time, the worst record went to somebody else. The 2013 Texans were projected for 10 wins and went 2-14. The 2023 Panthers were projected for 7.5 and went 2-15.

Even the 0-16 Browns of 2017 didn’t have the lowest number that summer. The Jets did, at 3.5, and they won five games.

A few of the lowest-rated teams turned out fine. The 2012 Colts shared the lowest total on the board at 5.5 and went 11-5 with a rookie Andrew Luck. The 2025 Saints had the lowest number at 4.5 and won six, which kept them out of the bottom five.

One in four top-five slots goes to a team nobody had there

The average preseason win total of our 85 bottom-five teams was exactly 7.0. That number hides a wide spread. Twenty-one of the 85, about one in four, were projected for 8.5 wins or more.

Six were projected for double-digit wins: the 2012 Eagles, 2013 Falcons, 2013 Texans, 2019 Chargers, 2022 Broncos and 2022 Rams. The Rams were defending champions that year and went 5-12.

The 2022 season was the wildest of the bunch. Four teams projected at 8.5 or higher (the Cardinals, Broncos, Colts and Rams) all finished with bottom-five records.

Collapses like these are common enough to plan around. At least one team projected for 8.5 wins or more crashed into the bottom five in 11 of the 14 seasons.

What it means for mock draft season

If your team opens the year projected for five wins or fewer, go ahead and start watching college tape. Nearly three out of four of those teams end up with a top-five slot.

In the 5.5 to 6.5 range, it’s closer to one in three. Hold off on the mock drafts until October.

And every year, leave room on your board for a surprise. History says a team that expected to be playing in January will be picking in the top five instead, and it may be the one picking first.

Guaranteed Sport Picks has handicapped the NFL since 1999. You can find our free NFL picks at GuaranteedSportPicks.com.