"Bill Barnwell is a senior NFL writer for ESPN.com. He analyzes football on and off the field like no one else on the planet, writing about in-season X's and O's, offseason transactions and so much more. He is the host of theBill Barnwell Show podcast, with episodes released weekly. Barnwell joined ESPN in 2011 as a staff writer at Grantland."
"Each week of the NFL campaign is like its own mini season. The league is doing its best to spread its wings from the traditional Thursday/Sunday/Monday schedule, but with the vast majority of games taking place in a Sunday afternoon firehose of football each week, the stories coming out of each weekend's games seem more meaningful than they do in pro baseball, basketball or hockey, where the next matchup and its takeaways are usually only a day or two away."
"I'm going to run through each week of the NFL season -- from Week 1 through Week 17 -- and identify three stories that were being told after that slate of games. One will be something that seemed meaningful at the time and turned out to be just that. The second will be a story that flew under the radar before revealing itself to be meaningful by the time we got to the end of December. And the third will be a story that seemed significant when it happened, only to end up being a fluke or something more irrelevant to the broader, seasonlong stories of 2025."
Each NFL week functions like a mini season, producing immediate narratives from a torrent of Sunday games. The league's expanded schedule spreads games across multiple days, but the Sunday slate still creates the most urgent storylines. Three types of narratives emerge each week: ones that matter then and at season's end; ones that initially fly under the radar but prove meaningful later; and ones that seem significant in the moment but turn out to be flukes or irrelevant to seasonlong trends. The analysis reviews every week from Week 1 through Week 17 to classify which stories fit each category.
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