2025 NFL season, playoff races: What mattered in Weeks 1-17

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.

But do all of those stories or takeaways hold up over the course of the entire season?

Let's examine that very idea. 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.

I'll go in chronological order, so we'll start with what happened in Week 1 and work all the way to the games we saw over the past few days as part of Week 17. What mattered? What didn't? And what seems like a bigger deal now than it did in the moment?