
The NFL’s beauty is in its urgency.
In baseball, the standings are borderline irrelevant until the Fourth of July. In basketball and hockey, 16 teams make the playoffs. But in football, a pair of losses to start the season is seen as a death knell for most teams in their quest to reach the postseason. From 1990 through the end of the 2024 season, only 32 of 279 teams that started 0–2 have made the NFL playoffs.