The AFC North had a perfect week, if not quite a perfect day. The Pittsburgh Steelers scored a key win back on Thursday, and the rest of the division won Sunday—in generally commanding fashion. The Baltimore Ravens, in particular, won by 34 points over the Seattle Seahawks, and the Cleveland Browns got their first shutout since 2007, a 27-0 win over the Arizona Cardinals.
It was such a good week for the division that, if the season were to end today, every team in the AFC North would advance to the playoffs. The Ravens are tied for the best record in the conference at 7-2 with the Kansas City Chiefs (but lose the tiebreaker), while the rest of the division is now 5-3. The only other non-division-leader with fewer than four losses is the 4-3 New York Jets, who play the Los Angeles Chargers tonight.
The Bengals did themselves a big favor last night by taking down the Buffalo Bills, who are not having the season everybody expected. Their loss to the Bengals was already their fourth of the season, dropping them to 5-4, though still just one game behind the 6-3 Miami Dolphins in the AFC East.
No division has sent four teams to the postseason since the mid-90s when the NFC East managed it twice, but that comes with a caveat. For most of NFL history, it hasn’t been possible for a division to send four teams to the playoffs. It was only for a span of about a decade from 1990-2001, and then since 2020, that it was an option.
The NFL added a third wild-card spot in 1990 during a time in which there were only three division winners per conference, which allowed four teams from the same division to advance. The realignment to four divisions per conference in 2002 then turned one wild-card spot into a division winner, but in 2020, the league added back a third wild-card spot to create seven seeds per conference.
The North has fared better than most since then. It sent three teams to the postseason in 2020, although none were the seventh seed. The Steelers were the seventh seed in 2021, and just missed making it again as the seventh seed last year.
Were the season to end right now, Pittsburgh would be the fifth seed, Cleveland the sixth, and Cincinnati the seventh, with Baltimore in the second spot behind the Chiefs. During wild-card weekend, the Ravens would host the Bengals while the Jaguars would host the Browns and the Steelers would be visiting the fourth-seeded Dolphins in Miami.
Of course, there are still eight or nine games to play for everybody, depending on the timing of their byes, so this really doesn’t mean very much now. It’s just a confirmation of preseason assumptions, which is this: the AFC North is the best division in football. Aside from the Bengals getting off to a slow start, nothing has contradicted that.
It is the only division without a team that has a losing record. The only division that doesn’t have two such teams is the AFC East, but the New England Patriots have the third-worst record in football at 2-7. It is only one of three divisions with a net winning record, and the only one that is more than three games above .500—at 11 games over.
