Four starting quarterbacks in NFL history have wins over all 32 NFL teams: Drew Brees, Brett Favre, Peyton Manning and Tom Brady. No quarterback has ever lost to all 32 teams, but Matt Ryan can come the closest this season.
Ryan has lost to 29 different teams in his NFL career, according to Pro-Football-Reference.com. And this year Ryan’s Colts play two of the three teams he hasn’t yet lost to: The Colts play the Jaguars twice and the Raiders once, and those are two of the three teams Ryan hasn’t lost to. If Ryan starts for the Colts and they lose to both the Jaguars and the Raiders, he’ll be the first starting quarterback with losses to 31 different teams.
The Colts don’t play the Falcons, a team Ryan obviously hasn’t lost to because he spent his entire career with the Falcons before they traded him to the Colts this offseason.
Although no starting quarterback has lost to 31 or 32 different teams, seven have lost to 30: Drew Bledsoe, Drew Brees, Brett Favre, Matt Hasselbeck, Jon Kitna, Carson Palmer and Alex Smith. But all of those quarterbacks are retired, so they can’t reach 31 losses like Ryan can. Among active quarterbacks, only Derek Carr has lost to 29 teams like Ryan, but Carr’s Raiders only play one of the teams he hasn’t lost to, the Saints, so the highest Carr can get this season is 30 teams.
In a strange way, losing to all 32 teams is a more difficult accomplishment than beating all 32 teams: Quarterbacks who lose a lot of games usually get benched or cut and don’t last long enough to lose to all 32 teams. It’s hard to keep a starting job for a long time while losing a lot of games. But Ryan has stuck around long enough that he can do something unprecedented in NFL history.