It’s early days, but you fear Southampton might set a few unwanted records this season.

After seven games, they are winless, with only a point to their name and just four goals scored.

At least the club has the faint afterglow of success from winning promotion last season, though there is one member of their team who doesn’t even have that — and, instead, has within his sights one of the more undesirable individual records around.

Step forward Ben Brereton Diaz, who has played 20 Premier League games in his career so far — six for Southampton, 14 for Sheffield United last season — without winning any. That is the record for the most games played by someone who has never won a Premier League game, ahead of Marvin Sordell on 17, and Emanuel Villa on 16.

Unlike that duo, he still has a chance of celebrating his first victory. However, the Chile international is also in danger of setting the record for the most games played by an individual before being involved in a Premier League win (see table below).

This, hopefully, is not designed to denigrate or mock Brereton Diaz. He has just been unfortunate enough to play for a couple of struggling sides. You could argue he has been part of those struggling sides, so bears at least some of the responsibility for the failure to win. But with six goals in 14 games for Sheffield United, he ended the season as their joint-top scorer despite only joining in January, while he has frequently looked like Southampton’s most threatening attacker this term.

His teams haven’t won any games, but it’s not necessarily his fault.

You could even argue that Brereton Diaz is almost being punished for being good. If you’re a terrible player in a terrible team, you probably aren’t going to stay in that team. But if you’re a decent player in a terrible team, you’ll be out there every week, your win-loss record at the mercy of the dysfunction around you.

In any case, the list of players who have taken a long time to get their first win isn’t exactly full of complete duds.

Take Gareth Bale, who appeared in 24 games for Tottenham before he claimed his first Premier League victory. His was a slightly different case, because it wasn’t down to him joining a struggling team, but more an odd quirk of his first two seasons at Tottenham; a combination of coincidence, poor form and injury conspiring to keep him out of the games Spurs won in that time.

Bale joined Spurs from Southampton in 2007 and, while he had to wait a long time for his first Premier League success, he did win in his fourth appearance for their first team when they beat Anorthosis Famagusta 6-1 in the UEFA Cup.

Having appeared sporadically in the following months, his season was ended in December by an ankle injury. He returned at the start of the following season, when Spurs infamously took just two points from their first eight games, but missed their first victory of the season because he had been sent off in the previous match. From there, he was in and out of the team, variously injured or out of favour, but his presence always coincided with draws or defeats and the team won plenty of times in his absence.

But his winless Premier League run became a running joke, one of the early football social media memes after Opta spotted the unfortunate statistic. In the end, it spanned 1,607 minutes over those 24 games, lasting 762 days and taking in three Spurs managers.

He eventually broke the streak on a bit of a technicality: he came on in the closing stages of Tottenham’s victory over Burnley in September 2009, when they were already 4-0 up and eventually won 5-0. And that was a deliberate move by then Spurs manager Harry Redknapp, to shake the unwanted statistical millstone. Redknapp told talkSPORT in 2019: “I stuck him on against Burnley… with six minutes to go. I thought, ‘He can’t mess this up!’”

He didn’t. And over the following years, he went on to win scores of games basically on his own so, by the time he left for Real Madrid in 2013, he was significantly in credit.

“It was a bit annoying that people went on about that statistic but it didn’t affect me at all,” Bale told The Guardian in 2010 after things had turned around. “It was just one of those things that freakily happened. I knew as soon as I got my chance to play we’d win a few games and it’d be done.”

Bale had to wait 24 games to taste victory with Tottenham in the Premier League (Clive Rose/Getty Images)

The current unfortunate record holder is Scottish forward Oliver Burke, who took an excruciating 25 games to taste Premier League victory for the first time.

Burke played his first Premier League game for West Brom in August 2017 after joining from RB Leipzig, but injuries ensured he only played in 15 matches, none of which West Brom won. And in his defence, they didn’t win many without him, either: this was the season in which they were relegated, went through four managers and endured an ill-fated mid-season trip to Barcelona where a group of players stole a taxi from outside a McDonald’s.

As for Burke, he reappeared in the Premier League a couple of years later, signing for Sheffield United at the end of the summer 2020 transfer window. Again, he wasn’t a regular, so had to wait until the January of that season before contributing to a win, which came against Newcastle.

The Blades were also relegated, so Burke has only played in two Premier League seasons, both of which have ended in the drop. Poor Oliver. He is currently with Werder Bremen after a couple of injury-hit loans at Millwall and Birmingham City.

Rob Earnshaw is another name in the top 10 who can’t be entirely blamed for not collecting a victory for a long time. It took 18 games before he won one for West Brom in 2004-05, but he did rattle up 11 goals that season, was the Baggies’ top scorer and, in terms of minutes per goal, he was second only to Thierry Henry in the whole division that season.

“The context of that season and that team was lots of new players,” Earnshaw tells The Athletic. “It was a team that wasn’t really expected to be in the Premier League. We were trying to figure each other out: I had about five different strike partners in that season. You’re always trying to get those relationships, so that’s perhaps why it took so long (to get a win).”

Earnshaw in a rare moment of joy for West Brom in the autumn of 2004 (Nick Potts – PA Images/PA Images via Getty Images)

That chopping and changing of the team’s forward line was also a reason why Earnshaw missed their rare victories. West Brom got their first three points in their eighth league game, a 2-1 win over Bolton in October, but Earnshaw was an unused substitute. Which itself presents a curious dilemma: when you haven’t won a game yet yourself, how do you feel when your team wins without you contributing?

“It’s a very strange thing, a very weird dynamic,” he says. “No 1, you’re always super happy when you win. I was always the first one to celebrate and congratulate my team-mates. But there’s always a weird feeling of disappointment. The No 1 thing is, that little kid in you just wants to play football and win games.”

Jan Aage Fjortoft is another unfortunate name on the list, having taken 20 games to earn his first first victory with Swindon in 1993-94. Swindon only won two games in the first half of that season, and Fjortoft missed both of them. But, unlike Earnshaw, he wasn’t a victim of squad rotation or injury: he missed those games because he wasn’t scoring goals.

After moving to Swindon for a club-record fee from Rapid Vienna following their promotion to the Premier League, Fjortoft did not find the net at all before the turn of the year.

“You start thinking, ‘Maybe the way I play doesn’t fit here — maybe I have to change’,” he tells The Athletic. “That’s the worst phase, because then you’re going nowhere. You’re building up to that moment, hopefully, when you get that first goal. But then you realise you just have to do what you do, because that’s good enough.

“It was a very testing time, and the thing that saved me was I was scoring goals for Norway, though that made it even more complicated in my head. Eventually, I wasn’t in the team as much, which is normal: Swindon had paid a lot of money for me to score goals.

“I was more annoyed that I didn’t break the code. I had played against these players before for Norway. We’d won against England. Why couldn’t I break this thing called the Premier League?”

Fjortoft celebrates scoring a goal for Swindon against Manchester United (Andy Heading/EMPICS via Getty Images)

Things reached a nadir when Fjortoft — still winless and goalless — played a reserve game against Wycombe Wanderers on Christmas Eve in which he was “out of 22 players… the worst on the pitch”. With the 1994 World Cup looming and his spot in the Norway team under threat, he arranged a loan back to his former club Lillestrom.

But then Keith Scott, who had been playing up front for Swindon instead of Fjortoft, was cup-tied for a game against Ipswich in the FA Cup. Fjortoft played, scored and kept his place for the league game against Tottenham a few days later. In that game he finally secured his first league goal, and first win in the English top flight, after 20 unsuccessful attempts, as they beat Spurs 2-1.

“It was fantastic,” he says. “There was a lot of relief for myself, but we beat Tottenham, and we were allowed to dream. Could we make it? Could we get enough points to stay up?”

Fjortoft had a sensational second half to the season: having failed to score at all in his first 20 games, he managed 11 in his next 16, although it wasn’t enough to save Swindon from relegation, broadly down to them conceding a whopping 100 goals.

Ultimately, it would be hugely unfair to treat Brereton Diaz or any of the players mentioned here as figures of fun. Not least because, by even making it to the Premier League, they’re already in the top one per cent of the top one per cent.

“When you get a chance to play in the Premier League, the playing is the actual achievement,” adds Earnshaw. “That’s the dream. You’re playing against the very best.”

(Top photo: Alex Dodd – CameraSport via Getty Images)

Anthony Lucas always looked the part. His physical tools, at 6 feet 6 and 275 pounds, once made him one of the most-coveted prospects in America, with the sort of towering potential that could transform a defense.

Yet aside from some flashes of brilliance, first at Texas A&M and then at USC, that potential largely had gone unfulfilled for two seasons. It took a new scheme, new staff and newfound focus from Lucas to finally unlock it at USC, where the first six weeks of this season offered more than a few glimpses of the junior defensive end as a force along the Trojans’ front.

That hope faded in a hurry Tuesday with word that Lucas suffered a season-ending injury in Saturday’s loss to Penn State. The injury leaves USC’s already-thin defensive line without its most-productive edge rusher the rest of the way.

Lucas underwent surgery Tuesday morning to repair what coach Lincoln Riley deemed to be “a lower-extremity” injury.

Lucas left the game early in the fourth quarter after slipping on a pass rush. He rolled into Penn State quarterback Drew Allar and was called for roughing the passer. But it was Lucas who remained sitting on the field, surrounded by trainers who appeared to be tending to an ankle.

The loss is a devastating blow to a USC defense that already was struggling to pressure opposing passers. Lucas led the Trojans with 12 pressures, four more than any other defender.

“Hate it for Anthony because he’s really improved and had a really strong impact on our defense,” Riley said. “But he’s in a good frame of mind, we’ll be excited to get him back next year and get him rolling and build on all the progress he made. And in the meantime, it’s gonna create an opportunity for some more guys to step up.”

The problem is very few of those options are proven. Sophomore Braylan Shelby is third on the team in pressures (seven) and the most experienced pass rusher whose role should presumably increase. But Riley also pointed to freshmen such as Kameryn Fountain and Lorenzo Cowan as potential beneficiaries of Lucas’ absence.

“You rely on the development that’s been going on behind the scenes and the guys that we’ve recruited,” Riley said. “Maybe there’s some guys you thought, well, maybe their role won’t be quite as much this year or maybe they redshirt, and now, all of a sudden they’re going to have that opportunity. All of us can point to our careers to guys who became phenomenal cornerstone-type players of a program who got their first shot like this.”

The hope had been that Lucas might be that cornerstone this season, developing into the defensive end that his skill set always suggested he could be. But that last step will have to wait another season, while USC scrambles to find someone new to take his place.

Etc.

Senior tight end Lake McRee, who injured a knee against Michigan, was fully dressed for practice.

This isn’t shaping up to be the year to need a quarterback in the NFL Draft, yet several teams already know where their priorities must lie this coming April.

The Las Vegas Raiders and New York Giants absolutely need to spend a high pick on a quarterback. The Tennessee Titans and Carolina Panthers almost certainly should, too, barring unexpected turnarounds from Will Levis and Bryce Young. The Cleveland Browns also need a change, although it’s fair to wonder whether ownership would support the use of a valuable draft resource on a player who could usurp Deshaun Watson, whose fully guaranteed contract runs through 2026. The Steelers may also be in limbo depending on how they feel about Justin Fields or Russell Wilson at season’s end.

Meanwhile, the Miami Dolphins need a much better plan with their backup quarterback, while the New York Jets, Los Angeles Rams, Seattle Seahawks and New Orleans Saints need to be thinking about the future. That group of teams can at least afford to pick their spots, which is better than forcing the issue. Then again, how often does a team turn a mid-round lottery pick into a franchise cornerstone?

The point is that we’re at the time of the year when teams need to be honest about their in-house evaluations. But just because teams determine they need a quarterback doesn’t necessarily mean they can acquire a quarterback.

Remember, the Giants tried last spring. When they couldn’t move up in the draft, they punted on the rest of the class rather than forcing themselves into taking someone they didn’t love. There’s something to be said for that, but that approach also increases the need to get it right the following year.

League evaluators are still trying to figure out where to rank the likes of Texas’ Quinn Ewers, Georgia’s Carson Beck, Colorado’s Shedeur Sanders, Alabama’s Jalen Milroe, Miami’s Cam Ward and Mississippi’s Jaxson Dart, among others. They’re intriguing players, but it wouldn’t be overly shocking if there’s a repeat of 2022 when there wasn’t a QB taken in the top 10.

To complicate the hunt, there aren’t any proven veterans who are set to hit the market in free agency. The best of that group may come down to Sam Darnold and Fields, along with veteran stopgap options such as Wilson and Joe Flacco.

The 2026 class will be far more exciting with the likelihood of Arch Manning’s declaration. More than likely, a team that fails to solve its QB void next year will be in the running for that prized No. 1 pick.

What’s the difference?

Joe Burrow entered the NFL as the No. 1 overall pick in 2020 after guiding LSU’s historic offense to an undefeated championship run that captured the nation’s attention. He was, essentially, the Cincinnati Bengals starter from the moment he arrived.

Brock Purdy entered the NFL as the last pick of the 2022 draft after an obscure career at Iowa State. He was buried behind Trey Lance and Jimmy Garoppolo on the San Francisco 49ers’ depth chart and only earned the starting job midway through his rookie season because of injuries.

Those labels are hard to shake, but it’s probably long overdue to consider Purdy among the game’s best quarterbacks.

Consider the pair’s regular-season stats since 2022.

The numbers are remarkably similar. Burrow has a clear edge in passing yards, but that’s to be expected with Purdy operating Kyle Shanahan’s run-heavy system.

Burrow is also 5-2 in the playoffs, and he was outstanding in 2021 when the Bengals toppled the Chiefs in the AFC Championship Game. They were a defensive stop shy of beating the Rams in the Super Bowl.

But Purdy is 4-2 in the playoffs, where he’s been terrific while guiding the 49ers to the NFC Championship Game in 2022 and the Super Bowl in 2023. They were also a defensive stop short of dethroning the Chiefs in February.

Purdy hasn’t gotten the same shine because of the way he entered the league. He also doesn’t get as much credit for his performance because of the 49ers’ scheme.

It’s time for that perception to change. Purdy is undoubtedly among the game’s best.

This star continues to shine in Seattle. Watch Brock Purdy’s best plays from #TNFonPrime.

More 🎥 on https://t.co/vpdsX5r07D pic.twitter.com/NXCjGiaonF

— San Francisco 49ers (@49ers) October 12, 2024

Maye day

Drake Maye delivered a strong starting debut against the Houston Texans, going 20-of-33 for 243 yards, three touchdowns and two interceptions. He also led the New England Patriots with 38 rushing yards and lost a fumble.

Drake Maye DIME for his first career touchdown pass!

📺: #HOUvsNE on CBS/Paramount+
📱: https://t.co/waVpO909ge pic.twitter.com/psTLjZvOoK

— NFL (@NFL) October 13, 2024

Maye registered the most passing yards against the Texans this season, which is impressive considering they’ve played Anthony Richardson, Caleb Williams, Sam Darnold, Trevor Lawrence and Josh Allen. It can be argued that his total deserves an asterisk considering the lopsided score, but let’s not dock Maye too much in his first career outing against a quality defense while the Patriots’ entire offensive operation around him has been in shambles.

Maye endured some issues, for sure. He sputtered with his accuracy, especially early, but he got into a groove with the hurry-up drive before the half. Maye delivered the exclamation point there with a majestic 40-yard touchdown to Kayshon Boutte, as the throw helped his second-year wideout gain late separation against cornerback Derek Stingley Jr. It was probably the best throw from a Patriots quarterback since Tom Brady wore the uniform.

Once Maye gets comfortable enough to readily make the more consistent throws, which he did more of in the second half, he’ll grow even more in that offense. He’ll also improve his confidence eventually, though that could take more time considering the state of New England’s offensive line.

Speaking of which, Maye’s performance should take some heat off Jerod Mayo. The first-year head coach has had some inconsistencies with his quarterback explanations over the last couple of months, and rival executives have taken notice. Then, people around the league wondered if Mayo rushed into the decision to start Maye last week, perhaps feeling some heat from the losing streak and breaking from the plan to ease Maye into action.

What’s more, the Patriots’ offensive line has been one of the worst units in the NFL, and those issues have only been compounded by injuries. Maye was under a lot of duress Sunday, particularly with two backup tackles playing the majority of the game.

However, he still delivered a better stat line than Jacoby Brissett in any of his five starts. Maye produced a Patriots season high in completions and passer rating (88.3), and he had more touchdowns in his debut than Brissett had all season (two).

This was an encouraging start. Now, Maye will take center stage Sunday morning in London when the Patriots meet the Jaguars, whose defense has given up the most passing yards in the NFL.

Maye debuted at No. 23 in the rankings because of his potential for a higher ceiling due to his draft stock. It’s also a fitting spot, as fellow rookies Caleb Williams (No. 19) and Jayden Daniels (No. 22) debuted slightly higher in Week 1.

Plead the fourth

Bo Nix is a battler. His competitiveness has kept the Denver Broncos in games that otherwise looked lost before the fourth quarter, again nearly erasing a 23-0 deficit with 16 final-quarter points Sunday against the Chargers.

The question, though, is whether the Broncos have been too conservative with Nix before the fourth quarter or if defenses are loosening their looks with some of these leads.

Breaking it down by quarters, Nix has been far more productive in the fourth, and it’s not even close. That’s where he’s got his most completions (41), yards (428), touchdowns (five, including passes and runs), first downs (28, including passing and running), highest completion percentage (69.5) and passer rating (93.0).

It’s not like the Broncos open the game in neutral. Nix has 97 passing attempts in the first half and 101 in the second half this season. But there’s something about the way he thrives in those “gotta-have-it” situations in the fourth quarter.

The @oregonfootball connection!

Bo Nix finds Troy Franklin for his first career TD catch!

📺: #LACvsDEN on CBS/Paramount+
📱: https://t.co/waVpO8ZBqG pic.twitter.com/FU4T8eKNT8

— NFL (@NFL) October 13, 2024

Then again, the Broncos trailed the Seahawks (26-13), Steelers (13-0) and Chargers by double digits in the fourth quarter. Nix wouldn’t be the first quarterback to improve his statistical output in “garbage time.”

It’s early in Nix’s career, so it’s important to find the bright spots in a rookie’s performance and accentuate them. It’d be fun to see if Nix could take another step in his development with the Broncos implementing some of those fourth-quarter successes earlier in their games.

Rankings notes

Dropped out: Derek Carr, oblique injury (last week, No. 21); Gardner Minshew, benched (last week, No. 27); Jacoby Brissett, benched (last week, No. 30).

Just a quick point of clarification: Carr was removed from the rankings because he is expected to miss at least one more game. Anthony Richardson remains in the rankings (rather than Joe Flacco) because his recovery timeline has been more uncertain. If the Colts had placed a more definitive timetable on Richardson’s injury, thereby vaulting Flacco definitively into the starting role, that would have led to an adjustment in the rankings.

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(Photo: Steph Chambers / Getty Images)