Six. That is how many games a season an NFL team plays against the same three opponents, for as long as both clubs exist. It is built into the schedule.
Guaranteed. No relegation, so a rival can never drop out of your way. There is always a next one. There is no escape.
Every sport has great rivalries. These ones are compulsory.
What the six games actually are
The league’s 32 clubs sit in eight divisions of four. Your division is your neighbourhood, and it never changes.
You play each of those three rivals twice, home and away. Six games, decided in advance rather than by a draw.
The other eleven rotate. These six never do.
Why that is more than it sounds
Six out of seventeen games is a big share of a short season. Roughly a third of the year, every year, against clubs you have history with.
Compare that to football. In a 38-game Premier League season you meet your biggest rival twice, which is about one game in nineteen. In the NFL it is closer to one in three.
So an NFL rivalry gets roughly seven times the share of the calendar.
It adds up faster than you would think
Do that for a century and the numbers get silly.
I have written up five of these rivalries in full, and between them those five pairs of clubs have played each over 600 times. The Bears and the Packers alone account for 213 of those, which makes it the most-played fixture in the sport.
Here is what each of the five is actually about.
Bears v Packers: the club owned by its fans
Chicago and Green Bay, either side of the Illinois and Wisconsin border. They first met in 1921 and have now played 213 times, more than any other pair of clubs in the sport.
Green Bay is the strange one. Every other club in the league has an owner or an owning family. The Packers have no owner at all, which makes them the only community-owned, non-profit club in American major professional sports. There are more Packers shareholders than there are people in the Green Bay metro area.
On the field it has been a see-saw for a century. The lead has changed hands again and again, and after 213 games it is still narrow.
Read it in full: Bears v Packers, including the third playoff meeting in their history, which happened in January.
Cowboys v Eagles: America’s Team and the city that hates the phrase
Dallas and Philadelphia sit about 1,300 miles apart with nothing local to argue about. What they have instead is a nickname.
An NFL film gave the Cowboys the tag “America’s Team” in 1978 and it stuck. In a proud, blue-collar city like Philadelphia, a glamorous Texas club branding itself the nation’s team was never going to land well. Philadelphia is also one of the hardest places in the sport to visit: in 1989 the crowd threw snowballs and ice at the Dallas coach as police walked him off the field.
The record says Dallas lead comfortably, 75-59. The decade data says they built almost all of it in the 1970s, and it has been near enough level ever since.
Read about the Cowboys v Eagles rivalry, including the Bounty Bowl and what actually happened.
Steelers v Ravens: two clubs built to hurt each other
Pittsburgh and Baltimore, 250 miles apart, both built around punishing defensive football. The scorelines are low, the hits are enormous, and the games are ugly in the way both sets of supporters mean as a compliment.
It is the youngest of the five. Baltimore only got this club in 1996, and the Ravens still tell every new arrival the same thing: you are not a Raven until you have beaten the Steelers.
Here is the number that captures it. Across 65 meetings, the two clubs are separated by 33 points in total. That is half a point a game, over thirty years.
Read about the Steelers v Ravens rivalry, including the meeting in January that cost a coach his job of eighteen years.
Chiefs v Raiders: the loudest crowd ever recorded
Kansas City and Las Vegas now, but this one goes back to 1960, when both clubs were founder members of a rival league trying to take on the NFL. They have been in the same division ever since.
Arrowhead Stadium in Kansas City holds the Guinness World Record for the loudest crowd roar at a sports stadium: 142.2 decibels, set in 2014. Chiefs supporters first took that record off Seattle a year earlier, during a game against the Raiders.
The Raiders bring the other half of it. They have spent decades cultivating an outlaw image, and they have moved city three times, from Oakland to Los Angeles to Oakland to Las Vegas. The rivalry survived all of it, because it was never really about the map.
Read about the Chiefs v Raiders rivalry, including how the Raiders’ eleven-game lead turned into a twenty-game deficit.
Patriots v Jets: level for fifty seasons, then one letter
Boston and New York, which means this one arrives with a grudge already attached. These cities have been arguing about sport since long before either football club existed, and the fans borrow freely from the baseball version.
The genuinely odd part is how much traffic there has been between the two organisations. Three men have coached both clubs. More than fifty players turned out for both between 1993 and 2008. Rivals do not usually swap this much.
And it stayed astonishingly even. After fifty seasons the series stood at fifty wins each. Then, in January 2000, a coach handed the Jets a handwritten note resigning the job he had held for one day, and went to New England.
Read the full Patriots v Jets rivalry, including what the record has done since.
If you are still choosing a club, the NFL teams hub has all 32 of them and what each has actually won. Whichever you land on, you inherit its enemies. That is part of the deal, and honestly it is part of the fun of being a fan.