Ryan Fitzpatrick spent two seasons as the Miami Dolphins’ quarterback, and this week he gave his former team the bleakest forecast anyone has put on the record. If Miami loses to the Las Vegas Raiders on Sunday, Fitzpatrick said, the Dolphins are headed for the first 0-17 season in NFL history.
The prediction came on the Sept. 10 episode of “Fitz & Whit,” the podcast Fitzpatrick hosts with former NFL tackle Andrew Whitworth, and the show clipped the segment for X the same afternoon. By Friday it had been picked up by Miami Dolphins On SI, Heavy and Yahoo Sports, and it arrived two days before Jeff Hafley coaches his first regular-season game.
Fitz thinks there's a possibility the Dolphins become the first team to ever go 0-17 👀
"I don't see a whole lot of wins in there… look at the way that their roster is constructed this year, you feel bad for them" pic.twitter.com/qCcyAahqvu
— Fitz & Whit (@fitzandwhit) September 10, 2026
“If the Dolphins lose to the Raiders in Vegas on Sunday, I think they’re gonna go 0-17 this year,” said Fitzpatrick. “I think they’ll be the first team in NFL history to go 0-17.”
What Fitzpatrick actually said
Fitzpatrick did not hedge. His reasoning ran through the schedule and the roster.
Miami draws every team in the AFC West and NFC North this season, plus San Francisco, Cincinnati and Indianapolis, and Fitzpatrick’s read was that the two games against New York are the only realistic openings once the Raiders game is gone.
“They’re playing the Jets twice, and that’s their shot,” Fitzpatrick said.
He added that he expects the Jets to be improved, then walked Whitworth to the conclusion that he could not find enough wins on the slate to justify a different number.
Fitzpatrick also pointed to the roster churn after cutdown day, when Miami claimed seven players off waivers, as a sign of where the depth chart stood, and to the dead money on the books. On the second point he is on solid ground.
The Dolphins are carrying $179.2 million in dead cap this season, the largest single-season total in league history, with Tua Tagovailoa’s $55.4 million charge alone ranking as the biggest individual hit in the NFL this year.
The 2019 team Fitzpatrick quarterbacked says otherwise
The problem with the prediction is that Fitzpatrick has already lived through the counterargument. He was Miami’s Week 1 starter in 2019, the first year of a rebuild that had just shipped out Ryan Tannehill, Cameron Wake and Robert Quinn, and that team opened with a 59-10 loss to Baltimore, a 43-0 loss to New England and a 31-6 loss at Dallas.
That is a combined score of 133-16 through three weeks, and the Dolphins did not win until Week 9. They started 0-7, and then they went 5-4 the rest of the way.
The wins came against the Jets, the Colts, the Eagles, the Bengals and, in the finale, a Patriots team that entered the day 12-3 and lost 27-24 at home. Miami finished 5-11 with Fitzpatrick starting the last 11 games, and a team that looked like a candidate for the wrong kind of history in September ended the year with a road upset of the AFC’s defending champion.
The 2019 Dolphins picked up six players off waivers between cutdown day and the opener, one fewer than this year’s group, and that the starting lineup from that Week 17 win in Foxborough would struggle to outclass the one Hafley is sending out Sunday.
The history Fitzpatrick is invoking is also thinner than the prediction implies. Since the 1970 merger, only three teams have finished a season without a win, the 1976 Buccaneers at 0-14 and the 2008 Lions and 2017 Browns at 0-16.
The closest the Dolphins have come was 2007, when they started 0-13 before winning once. Every one of those teams had bad quarterback play, bad luck and a schedule that never opened a door, and none of them had 17 chances.
The Raiders are the reason the prediction has a trigger
Fitzpatrick built his forecast on Sunday for a reason. Las Vegas is the game the market has priced as Miami’s most winnable, and the Raiders are not a finished product either.
They held the No. 1 overall pick in April and are starting Kirk Cousins over the rookie they took with it, Fernando Mendoza. The Raiders were 3.5-point favorites at FanDuel earlier this week.
That was before Las Vegas ruled out Pro Bowl tight end Brock Bowers. Running back Ashton Jeanty is off the injury report and will play, but the Raiders’ best receiving option is gone for the opener, and the number that had already moved against Miami once this month now has a reason to move back.
Raiders RB Ashton Jeanty officially is off the injury report and good to go Sunday against the Dolphins.
Tight end Brock Bowers officially has been ruled out Sunday.
— Adam Schefter (@AdamSchefter) September 11, 2026
The Dolphins, meanwhile, are as healthy as they have been for a Week 1 in years. Every player on the 53-man roster is available Sunday, even with safety Dante Trader added to Friday’s report with a hamstring issue.
Backup quarterback Kyle McCord has gotten extra work this week, including 7-on-7 reps, and Hafley has said he is confident McCord can run the offense if needed. Rookie receivers Chris Bell and Caleb Douglas are listed as starters, and there is no pitch count on Bell.
None of that makes Miami the better team on paper. It does mean the Dolphins are walking into the one game Fitzpatrick’s whole prediction depends on without an injury excuse, against an opponent playing a 38-year-old quarterback and missing its best pass catcher.
Fitzpatrick’s own Las Vegas history
There is one more reason the location matters. The last time Fitzpatrick played at Allegiant Stadium, he came off the bench for a rookie Tagovailoa with 9:47 left and Miami trailing by three, led three straight scoring drives and set up Jason Sanders’ 44-yard field goal with one second remaining in a 26-25 win on Dec. 26, 2020.
The key play was a completion to Mack Hollins that Fitzpatrick got off while his helmet was being pulled back, and the penalty that followed put Miami in range. That game did not happen because the Dolphins had the better roster.
It happened because a veteran quarterback made a throw he had no business completing, and the Raiders, then 7-8, made a clock-management decision they would rather forget. Fitzpatrick’s career is a 17-year argument that any given Sunday is not a cliche, and Sunday in Las Vegas is the first one this Dolphins team gets.
Fitzpatrick’s prediction is only live if Miami loses. If the Dolphins win, it disappears, and the conversation moves to whether Hafley’s team can find a second one.
If they lose, the number sits over the next 16 weeks until somebody takes it down, and the 2019 schedule suggests that would take one Sunday against the Jets, not a miracle.
