Year’s end is always a cause for reflection, a moment to look back at all the good and bad that happened over the preceding 12 months. If you’re playing football for the Georgia Bulldogs, there’s a lot more of the good! If you play for the Houston Texans, maybe less so. So, in what has […]
We’ve all seen a team lose football’s biggest game, march into the following season, and then tumble into a ravine. In fact, the post-Super Bowl defeat hangover has happened enough times that the word “curse” is frequently bandied about. Since the AFL-NFL merger in 1970, 15 of 51 Super Bowl losers have missed the playoffs […]
neil (Neil Paine, acting sports editor): Hello football fans! With Maya wrapped up in election coverage, we’re going to have a little bit of a different chat today — I’ll be leading, which means I’m somehow going to have to transition from flippant shitposter to stern chat-master. (We’ll see how THAT goes…) But otherwise, we’ve […]
maya (Maya Sweedler, copy editor): We’re ready for some football! The NFL is back, and so are FiveThirtyEight’s weekly Slack chats. Regular readers will see some familiar faces and some unfamiliar ones. (Hello! Excited to be here.) Josh and Neil are back, and you’ll get to know me and our rotating group of contributors throughout […]
In the 18 Super Bowls played between 2002 and 2019, Tom Brady and the New England Patriots represented the AFC in exactly half of them. Brady switched conferences following the 2019 season to join Tampa Bay … and has since started for the NFC in half of those Super Bowls, too. So it’s fitting that […]