Circulating this week on official social media channels of the NFL is discussion of the Jacksonville Jaguars‘ nine-game winning streak.
You’d be forgiven for doing a double take.
The Jaguars have won nine games in a row? Wouldn’t that mean they won the Super Bowl?
Not by how the league is doing this math.
Explaining Jaguars’ 9-Game Winning Streak
The key marker, of course, is regular season winning streak.
The NFL did spell that out explicitly when it posted this on Reddit:
“Over their 9-game regular season winning streak, the Jaguars have a point differential of +177. The next closest team is the San Francisco 49ers at +96, more than 80 points behind.”
It’s certainly an impressive statistic, so kudos to the Jags on that.
It’s just that not all the postings have been as factual about it as the way the NFL wrote it on its official Reddit account.
Some posts are simply discussing the Jaguars’ nine-game streak, and that’s definitely confusing.
Does it Work Like That?
The key point to make here first is that it’s all nomenclature. Something is simply what someone wants to call it.
The Jaguars have won the last nine games they’ve played in the regular season whether that can be referred to a winning streak or not.
Yes, they were knocked out in their first playoff game a year ago by the Buffalo Bills, so in a way, that ended the streak. They won the last eight games of the regular season last year to go 13-4 and win the AFC South Division, but then they lost in early January at home to the Bills.
That meant that the last game they played entering this season was a Jacksonville loss. That makes it tough to consider their Week 1 win over the Browns an extension of a winning streak.
There’s nothing incorrect about calling it a regular season winning streak, but that sort of misses some of the point that seasons are played to win the final game, and the Jags didn’t do that last season.
Keeping track of winning streaks like this is a relatively common practice in high school athletic associations around the country. Because for a long time playoff structures either didn’t exist or were hard to qualify for, teams kept track of what they did the rest of the year as its own thing, even if they didn’t win state championships in between multiple regular season combined winning streaks.
Even there, there’s a bit of hollowness to it, like it doesn’t really feel the same as an unstoppable winning streak because seasons did end, potentially, with a loss.
The Jags are a different team than the one that ended the 2025 campaign with a playoff loss. And now they’re 1-0.
Have they really won nine in a row? Sure, but not really.
Jaguars Aren’t Really on a 9-Game Winning Streak