Four games no longer represent a quarter of the NFL season under the new 17-game schedule, but it's close enough for the purposes of today's column. It's easy to get carried away and overreact to one week's results, but four weeks can feel like an eternity. What happened over the first month of the season isn't necessarily going to keep recurring over the remainder of the season.
And yet, sometimes it does! Think back to Josh Allen's hot start over the first four weeks of the 2020 campaign. It would have been easy to write off his excellent four-game stretch as a mirage given how he had played in 2018 and 2019. Allen slowed a bit over the next four weeks ... and was the second-best quarterback by Total QBR in the entire league from Week 9 on. He finished second in the MVP race. Some hot starts are flashes in the pan. Allen's was not.
Let's run through a handful of situations around the league and break down what I think is and is not real from the first four weeks of the NFL calendar. I'll start with some topical news:
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Derrick Henry's staggering workload
Ben Roethlisberger's struggles
Miami's biggest concern
How bad is Washington's defense?
How good is the Bills' defense?
Lessons from surprising moves
