With their 98-91 loss this afternoon to the New York Knicks, the New Jersey Nets have now lost all 13 of their games thus far this season. The NBA record for worst start to a season is 0-17.

UPDATE: The Nets' losing streak has progressed to 0-16 and the coach has been fired.

For the first time in Coach Pete Carroll's nine years on the job, his University of Southern California football team has lost a game played in November, with yesterday's 55-21 shellacking by Stanford. As noted in the linked L.A. Times article, "The November win streak, which reached 28-0 with last week's victory at Arizona State, began in 2001, when the Trojans finished fast and wound up in the Las Vegas Bowl."

November is arguably the toughest month for a team, as it plays some of its biggest traditional rivals with placement in as good a bowl game as possible often at stake. USC's 28 consecutive November victories are shown in the following list, by opponent (@ = road game). Indeed, one sees games against cross-town rival UCLA (although the Bruin-Trojan battle was later moved to early December) and national rival Notre Dame (only in the even-numbered years, as the teams play in South Bend, Indiana, in the middle of October in odd-numbered years, supposedly because USC does not want to play in the cold of November).

2001 Oregon State, @California, UCLA
2002 @Stanford, Arizona St., @UCLA, Notre Dame
2003 Washington St., @Arizona, UCLA
2004 @Oregon St., Arizona, Notre Dame
2005 Stanford, @California, Fresno St.
2006 @Stanford, Oregon, California, Notre Dame
2007 Oregon St., @California, @Arizona State
2008 Washington, California, @Stanford, Notre Dame
2009 @Arizona State

In one sense, the 28-game win streak survived on a bit of a technicality; in 2006, USC lost to UCLA, but game was played on December 2. USC's game-by-game logs from 2002-2009 can be found here, whereas the 2001 log can be found here.

The Indianapolis Colts survived a scare today from Houston, to lift their record to 8-0 this season. As noted in this ESPN.com article, the Colts have now won 17 straight NFL regular-season games, which ties for the third-longest such streak in league history. A year ago, the Colts won their final nine regular-season games, before making a quick exit from the playoffs at the hands of San Diego.

The NFL also has one other 8-0 team, the New Orleans Saints, who beat Carolina today.

For all of Alex Rodriguez's hitting slumps during previous years' MLB playoffs, the Yankee slugger really turned things around this year in helping his team to the World Series title. In this year's 15 Yankee postseason games, ARod hit 5 doubles and 6 homers, batted .365, sported a .500 on-base percentage, and slugged at a clip of .808. The latter statistic means that he nearly averaged a full base on all of his official at-bats (Rodriguez stat page on ESPN.com).