With a long offseason between the 2025 and 2026 NFL seasons, fans are looking ahead to new rosters and the futures shaped by the recent draft, while still trying to make sense of last year's surprises and disappointments.
With the benefit of hindsight, many teams are now looking for ways to replicate the reigning champion Seattle Seahawks' remarkable run. After losing their opener, the Seahawks won 14 of their next 16 games and closed the year on a 7-1 stretch over their final eight.
Seattle then beat both of its conference rivals in the postseason, with the Rams providing the only real test, before adding a new trophy to the case.
That run brings back a familiar question. Does momentum late in the season actually matter?
The truth is more complicated than a simple yes or no. Regular season form, whether a team is hot or cold heading into January, has surprisingly little predictive power on its own. The Seahawks happened to be excellent for most of last season and still won it all, but plenty of teams have been just as excellent down the stretch and gone home early. The more revealing pattern is found at the other end of the spectrum, in teams that stumbled into the playoffs and somehow won anyway.
Champions Don’t Always Enter Hot
Let's look at a few examples of teams that entered the playoffs with little momentum, only to win it all. None of these teams were catching fire late in the regular season. Instead, they finished on mediocre or disappointing runs before flipping the switch once the postseason began.
One of the clearest examples came in 2010, when the Green Bay Packers finished the regular season 10-6, going 4-3 after their bye week before heading into the playoffs. That year became a turning point for a younger Aaron Rodgers, who led the Packers to their fourth championship since the start of the Super Bowl era.
The very next season, the New York Giants pulled off something even harder to explain. A year after finishing 10-7, the 2011 Giants stumbled to 9-7 and won only three of their final eight games, yet still made the playoffs and put together one of the most memorable Cinderella runs in sports history.
Their path, ironically, led straight into the defending champion Packers, who had gone 15-1 that season and lost only once all year, and that single Packers loss had come by just five points back in Week 15.
Most people expected Green Bay to win easily, with the line sitting at 7.5 points in the Packers' favor. Instead, the Giants went into Lambeau and dismantled them, 37-20.
The 2012 Baltimore Ravens entered the playoffs at 10-6 after stumbling to a 1-4 finish, hardly the resume of a team built to beat the Indianapolis Colts and then the top-seeded Denver Broncos at altitude.
Nobody gave Baltimore much of a chance. Their win probability dropped to an astonishing 0.8 percent during that game in Denver, and Ray Lewis was playing what would turn out to be his final season. They won anyway. The Mile High Miracle remains a permanent part of Ravens history, and it carried them all the way to a championship that year.
And don't forget the 2009 Saints, who dropped their final three regular-season games before delivering Drew Brees and the city of New Orleans their only Lombardi Trophy.
All of that happened over a decade ago, though. What does the modern league actually look like?
Talent Outlasts Momentum
Those historical examples prove the point from one direction. But Seattle's run last year actually proves it from the other. The Seahawks were excellent practically all season, yet what carried them to a championship was not momentum either, hot or cold. It was sustained talent, and that has become the dominant force in the modern league.
Today's league offers a different perspective on the same question. Since 2019, the same core group of teams has dominated the Super Bowl picture, with only a few newcomers breaking through: the Cincinnati Bengals, Tom Brady's Buccaneers, and most recently, last year's Seahawks.
Outside of those exceptions, the Kansas City Chiefs, Philadelphia Eagles, Los Angeles Rams, San Francisco 49ers, and, before them, the New England Patriots have spent years cycling in and out of championship contention. These teams are not winning because they happened to get hot in December. They are winning because they consistently have strong quarterbacks, capable coaching staffs, and rosters deep enough to survive injuries and inevitable stretches of poor form.
Tampa Bay's 2020 title run did follow a strong finish after its Week 13 bye, but that likely had as much to do with Tom Brady's postseason pedigree as any broader momentum effect.
Kansas City also entered its 2022 championship run playing excellent football, yet that explanation becomes harder to defend a year later when a noticeably weaker Chiefs offense still found a way to win another Lombardi Trophy. All roads eventually lead back to talent, and Patrick Mahomes has established himself as one of the league's defining players, capable of changing a game with a single drive.
Coaching matters just as much. Andy Reid, Nick Sirianni, and Sean McVay have become fixtures in the postseason because their organizations consistently put strong teams on the field year after year.
The modern NFL is increasingly defined by sustained organizational strength, not late-season momentum, whether that momentum runs hot or cold. The real constant is talent, developed and maintained over years rather than created or erased by a few games in either direction. History suggests the teams that ultimately win championships are usually the ones built to withstand pressure, not the ones whose final few weeks of the regular season happened to look impressive or forgettable.
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