The NFC North keeps stacking wins, and the rest of the league is stuck watching it happen.
Chicago survived a wild Sunday night, hanging on after five turnovers to beat the Buccaneers 27-24. That alone would have been a headline.
But the Bears were just one piece of a division-wide surge. The Packers won again.
The Lions won again. And for at least another day, none of those three clubs can claim the one-loss status the Vikings still hold.
That’s the part that makes this division feel different right now. All four NFC North teams are headed into Week 10 in the playoff picture. Head-to-head games could eventually complicate the postseason math, but as a group, these teams are separating themselves from everyone else.
The numbers tell the story fast. The NFC North is 25-8 (.757) through nearly nine weeks, and five of those eight losses came in games against each other. In non-divisional play, the four teams are 20-3.
After Sunday night, the standings looked like this, with Minnesota still set to play Monday:
Vikings 6-1 (.857)
Bears 7-2 (.778)
Lions 6-2 (.750)
Packers 6-3 (.667)
That means every team in the division is at least three games over .500. The Packers sit in last place at 6-3, which says everything about how crowded the top of this division has become. For comparison, the 3-5 Panthers lead their division.
Chicago’s four-game winning streak hasn’t been enough to pull away, mostly because everybody around the Bears keeps winning too. Still, a Vikings loss to the Bills on Monday night would push the Bears into first place.
The bigger picture is even more striking. Since the NFL moved to four-team divisions in 2002, the best division record belongs to the 2024 NFC North, which finished 45-23 (.662).
That year, the Lions went 15-2, the Vikings 14-3, the Packers 11-6 and the Bears 7-10. Two years earlier, the NFC East finished 43-23-2 and sent three teams to the playoffs.
This NFC North is on pace to top that. At 25-8 (.757), the division would need to go 20-15 the rest of the way to match the 2024 mark.
There are still seven divisional games left, so the North is guaranteed to take at least 15 more losses. If the four teams limit the damage to just eight more losses from here, they would tie their own record from 2002.
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Derrick Moores night stood out because it came with a breakthrough moment, the sort of snap that can change how a player is viewed inside a locker room. Jahmyr Gibbs finished the job with a game-sealing touchdown, while Jake Bates stayed steady on the scoreboard, but the bigger takeaway for Detroit may be how quickly the defense is turning disruption into wins and giving the Lions another difference-maker to lean on. [Read more 🡒]