Imperfect season An imperfect season ( more accurately , an anti - perfect season or a perfectly bad season ) is defined as a team losing all of their games . It is the antithesis of a perfect season , and is often referred to as such in a tongue - in - cheek manner . This ignominy has been suffered eleven times in professional American football , six times in arena football , thrice in professional Canadian football . Gridiron football . Because of the short schedules of college and professional football seasons , there is a possibility that a very bad team will not manage to win any games . Before overtime was used consistently , teams might tie a game without winning one ; these are generally counted in lists of winless seasons . NFL Teams with no wins in a season ( 8 or more games ) . The Rochester Jeffersons went a combined 0 - 21 - 2 over four seasons from 1922 to 1925 , but in none of those seasons did they ever play more than seven games . NFL Teams with only one win in a season ( 8 or more games ) . Source : Worst NFL Teams of all time ( ESPN ) Arena Football League . The short length of seasons in arena football makes imperfect seasons quite possible . The following teams have gone through an Arena Football League season without winning a game : United Football League . The United Football League has had , to date , one winless season . In their inaugural season , the 2009 New York Sentinels lost all six of their games . The team , which was a traveling team that played games in Hartford , Long Island and New Jersey ( and had intended to play a game in New York City but backed out ) , fired its head coach and settled permanently in Hartford to become the Hartford Colonials . Under the UFL ' s double round robin format , only one team can finish any particular season entirely with losses , since every team plays each other at least twice . The 2009 California Redwoods lost all their games except their two games against the Sentinels ; they relocated from San Francisco to Sacramento ( as the Sacramento Mountain Lions ) for 2010 . Both the Colonials and Mountain Lions made improvements on their records the following season . Other American football leagues . Since non - professional , semi - pro and minor league teams are inherently unstable in their membership , it is far easier for seasons in which a teams wins no games to occur . In the case of non - professional teams , neither mechanisms to force a team to shut down against its will , nor effective drafts or revenue sharing mechanisms to distribute talent evenly among teams typically exist , leading to poor teams accumulating multiple winless seasons . Five teams in football history have failed to score a single point in an entire season ; all played eight games or less . There are at least twelve teams who have accumulated losing streaks of 20 games or more ; there are also four teams who have accumulated seasons of all losses with at least 13 games . In the case of minor professional football , particularly in indoor football leagues , winless seasons often result from an owner ' s abandonment or other financial hardship . The American Indoor Football Association had at least one winless team in five out of six seasons ; it also had at least one team with one win or less in all six seasons , including one team ( the Ghostriders / Ghostchasers ) that , despite two reorganizations , lost every game in their two - year existence . The National Indoor Football League went its first three seasons without a winless season , but beginning in 2004 , at least one team went winless every year until the league ' s collapse in 2007 . Though the Spring Football League had two teams with winless seasons ( the Los Angeles Dragons and the Miami Tropics ) , and the Stars Football League had one such team ( the traveling 2011 Michigan Coyotes ) , they are almost never mentioned in discussions of perfect and perfectly bad seasons , since those teams only played two games each before the seasons were cut short . Canadian Football League . The Canadian Football League currently has a regular season of eighteen games ; from 1952 to 1985 it was generally sixteen games as with the current NFL season , though those teams in the Eastern Division played only fourteen as late as 1973 . Consequently , especially given the much smaller number of teams playing , there have been fewer imperfect or nearly imperfect seasons than in the National Football League , with the exception of the first decade or so when fewer games were played .