Friday, November 29, 2024, marks the 125-year anniversary of the formation of FC Barcelona.

To mark the occasion, The Athletic is running a series of pieces, celebrating the people and the moments who have helped make the club what it is today.

We have told you about the story of Joan Gamper, the man who founded the club, and run through some of the most significant numbers in Barca’s history. Now, we look at the scarcely believable story of when their star striker, Quini, was kidnapped in 1981…

“Quini’s wife called me at four o’clock in the morning. She told me he hadn’t come home that night and that she hadn’t heard anything from him.”

Former Barcelona president Joan Gaspart is talking to The Athletic about one of the most unusual incidents in the club’s history.

It was Sunday, March 1, 1981, and Gaspart was vice-president. Barca had beaten Hercules 6-0 at the Camp Nou and La Liga’s top scorer Quini had provided two goals. Barca looked on course for the Spanish title — something that had not happened since 1973-74, in Johan Cruyff’s playing days and when Quini was scoring goals for Sporting Gijon instead.

There was a sense of euphoria in the city and among the players, who decided to go for dinner at a restaurant near the ground.

It was the restaurant Can Fuste, a 15-minute walk from Camp Nou. Everyone was waiting for the then 31-year-old star striker Quini, full name Enrique Castro Gonzalez — but he never arrived.

“There were seven or eight of us,” Carles Rexach — one of the players in the squad tells The Athletic. “(Barca centre-back and Quini’s close friend Jose Ramon) Alexanko met us and said he didn’t know where he was or where he had gone.”

The last anyone had heard from Quini was a TV interview in which he spoke about their upcoming game against Atletico Madrid. Atletico were in first place, two points ahead of Barca and the game was crucial.

Mari Nieves, Quini’s wife, had flown back from Gijon that afternoon with her two children, as she did on many weekends. After the match, her husband stopped by the house to pick up his things before getting in his Ford Granada to head to Barcelona airport to pick her up.

“His wife (when he did not appear at the airport) had called several hospitals, police stations or any place where they might know something,” Gaspart says. “He didn’t show up. Nobody knew anything. We went to his house at five or six o’clock in the morning thinking, ‘Where could he be?’”

Gaspart, then-Barca president Josep Lluis Nunez and Alexanko spent the night at Nieves’ house and immediately called the police.

The next day, the report of Quini’s disappearance became official. The three men stayed with Nieves until she received a call that began to give her answers.

The case caused a stir across the country. It was reported in all the major media outlets and rumours began to spread about whether the Basque separatist group ETA had been involved after terrorising Spain with a number of attacks.

Nieves received the first of 21 calls from her husband’s kidnappers. It was not ETA but three people with no criminal record and no jobs who had tried to solve their financial problems by kidnapping one of the country’s biggest football stars and demanding a large ransom.

“The news spread like wildfire all over Barcelona,” Josep Maria Minguella, a former agent and a figure who has been closely linked to the club over the years, tells The Athletic.

“There was a lot of consternation. With ETA active, there were a lot of kidnappings at the time, but it had never happened to a player. It was reminiscent of what had happened to (Real Madrid legend Alfredo) Di Stefano a few years earlier (when he was kidnapped by Venezuelan guerrillas in 1963).”

As Rexach puts it 43 years later, “At first we thought it was a joke because it was unimaginable.”

On his way home from the airport, Quini had stopped to fill up his car when the three men suddenly assaulted him and forced him into the vehicle at gunpoint. They later abandoned the car and put Quini in a hood and wooden crate in a van and drove to Zaragoza, around a four-hour drive to the west of Barcelona.

There they transferred him to a hideout, where he spent 23 days locked up.

Quini had been top scorer five times in La Liga and had scored 73 goals across four seasons with Barcelona.

“He was one of the best players in Spain and was constantly in the media spotlight,” Rexach says. “They knew kidnapping him was going to have a big impact.”

“He was such a charismatic man and he was good to people,” Juan Carlos Perez Rojo, a player who was in the ‘B’ team but trained with Barca’s senior side, tells The Athletic. “They knew everyone was going to step up and give him the money he needed.” Rojo and Quini became friends some time after the kidnapping and he is into his 46th year at Barca, where he works as a scout.

“As a person he was very simple, a good person, kind,” says Minguella, who helped sign Quini from Sporting Gijon. “He didn’t deserve all the things that happened to him and his family. It’s one of those moments when you realise that life can be unfair.”

Quini with Nieves on the day of his release (Xavier Bonilla/NurPhoto via Getty Images)

It later emerged the kidnappers’ main target had been the then-Barcelona coach Helenio Herrera. When they found out he had a cold, they changed their plans as they feared he might die during the kidnapping.

In the days that followed, the police worked in secrecy.

“There was a lot of upheaval,” says Minguella. “The police controlled the situation and didn’t want too many people to intervene.”

“The police didn’t want people to get in the way, even if they wanted to help,” adds Rexach. “So they just let Alexanko be the one to help.”

Barcelona asked La Liga to postpone the match against Atletico that weekend. The Spanish top flight denied that request, Barca played and lost 1-0 at the Vicente Calderon, Atletico’s former home. The German midfielder Bernd Schuster, who threatened not to play, blamed Nunez and Herrera for the match going ahead.

“There were people who didn’t want to play until they found him and there was a bit of a struggle because the coach thought we had to play even if he wasn’t there,” says Rexach. “It was complicated.”

Barca played two more games with Quini still missing, losing 2-1 to Salamanca and drawing 0-0 with Real Zaragoza. They would finish four points behind champions Real Sociedad in fifth place.

“That year we didn’t win La Liga because we spent those three weeks just thinking about Quini,” Rexach says.

Meanwhile, the police continued to do their job. As calls from the kidnappers were made from phone boxes, they asked Telefonica, Spain’s leading telecoms company which owned them, to cooperate.

“The kidnappers went completely unnoticed,” Juan Martinez Ruiz, one of the 20 officers in charge of the case, later told Spanish magazine Libero. “That was the main reason it took so long to locate them. They had never broken a dish, they had no previous convictions, they were not related to criminals… They were absolutely normal.”

The police issued a statement appealing for the public to help and had to deal with an avalanche of false leads. Telefonica had trouble identifying the origin of the calls.

In one of their calls, the kidnappers told Nieves they were nervous because of how much Quini ate, given they no longer had enough money to buy sandwiches. They were demanding 100 million pesetas for his ransom (worth around €600,000 today), a figure that had risen from the original 70 million pesetas.

In one of the attempts to pay the kidnappers, the police asked Alexanko to go to La Jonquera, a Catalan town close to the French border, with a briefcase full of banknotes. The kidnappers asked him to cross the border, but the police refused because the French authorities would have arrested him on the spot.

On March 20, the three men asked the money to be paid into a Credit Suisse bank account.

“Barca were looking for solutions because the kidnappers were very absent-minded,” Minguella says. “Those who kidnapped him did not have very clear ideas about what ransom they wanted to ask for and were changing their strategy.

“Nunez’s secretary called me to find out if I had any way of getting money in Switzerland, where the kidnappers asked for the money to be deposited. I was doing business in Luxembourg and Switzerland and I had money there. I said yes and agreed to help with the payment.”

The bank account was in the name of one of the kidnappers, Victor Miguel Diaz Esteban. The Swiss police worked closely with their Spanish counterparts to track him down. Diaz Esteban went to Switzerland to withdraw one million pesetas in U.S. dollars on March 24; within 18 hours, the police had arrested him after finding the hotel where he was staying and following his steps when he left for the airport to catch a plane to Paris. He was interrogated and confessed to holding Quini in a basement in Zaragoza.

In less than a day, the police released him and arrested a second kidnapper.

Quini later told friends this was when he was most afraid because he heard a lot of noise and thought the kidnappers would kill him. But on the night of March 25, radios across Spain announced he had been freed.

When he arrived in Barcelona, a huge crowd was waiting for him at the police station — Quini had to go out to greet them.

The striker prepares to give a press conference after his release (FC Barcelona)

“When he came out he was in a very bad state, you could see it,” Rexach says. “All I know is that I gave him a hug. He was hidden in a place with no light for 23 days. It’s something you wouldn’t wish on your worst enemy.”

“He wanted to play and get back to normal as soon as possible,” Rojo says. “They gave him psychological support, I heard about it from team-mates some time later.”

Quini returned for the last four games of the La Liga season, playing again barely a week after his release, and was received with full honours at every ground he played at. He played 90 minutes in each of his first three league games after his return — scoring twice in a 5-2 win against Almeria — and still finished as La Liga’s top scorer with 20 goals. He also scored in both legs of the Copa del Rey semi-final and twice in the final against his boyhood side Sporting Gijon in the final as Barca lifted Spain’s national cup.

“On every pitch, when they said Quini’s name, there was five minutes of applause,” Rojo says. “He had a spectacular reception.”

The three kidnappers were sentenced to 10 years in prison and given a five million peseta fine.

“They were simple people, without great possibilities,” Quini told a press conference after his release. “They fed me with sandwiches because they couldn’t afford any more.”

“There were team-mates who made jokes after that,” Rojo says. “Sometimes, when we were in hotels after dinner when you go to the room, there were team-mates who would go into his wardrobe to scare him when he arrived.”

Quini spent three more seasons at Barcelona, finishing with 73 goals in 141 appearances for the Catalans. He then returned to Sporting Gijon in 1984, where he spent the last three years of his playing career. He worked as a coach, team delegate and director of institutional relations for them.

The kidnapping had a very real impact on Quini, who died of a heart attack aged 68 in 2018. He was given an emotional tribute by the Camp Nou, with a huge tifo unfurled that read ‘Quini, sempre recordat’ — Quini, always remembered.

The Camp Nou tribute to Quini after his death (Xavier Bonilla/NurPhoto via Getty Images)

“This affected him a lot throughout his life,” Rexach says. “He spent many days locked underground in a very small cell. He didn’t want to talk about it because every time he did, he relived the trauma.

“He did tell me that when he was fed by the kidnappers he sometimes kept (the food) to himself. He thought that if they hunted them down and killed them, it would be impossible for anyone to find him there and he would starve to death.

“He had those 23 days in his head until the day he died. People think he forgot it quickly, but he didn’t. When someone would ask him a question (about it), you’d see him change the subject very quickly.

“It’s the most unbelievable thing that has happened to Barca in its history.”

(Top photos: Getty Images; design: Eamonn Dalton)

Marc Bergevin was fired three years ago today by the Montreal Canadiens and completely disappeared from the media glare, eventually settling into an enjoyable gig with the Los Angeles Kings.

The extreme lifestyle change of going from the constant public spotlight as Habs GM for nearly a decade to near-obscurity as senior adviser without a public profile with the Kings while living in Redondo Beach, Calif., well, that suits Bergevin just fine.

“I have no regrets about my time in Montreal,” Bergevin told The Athletic this week. “It was a great nine and a half years, and I have nothing but positive memories. But there is certainly a spotlight there.

“Here, you go to Starbucks to get your coffee in the morning and nobody knows who you are.”

Which is exactly what he needed. Three years to decompress.

“After I left Montreal, I remember thinking I wanted to be a GM again right away, but looking back, it would have been the wrong thing for me to jump back right in,” Bergevin said. “I needed this time to reenergize.”

It’s not like he’s been sitting on his hands. He’s working full-time for Rob Blake, advising and traveling and doing whatever the Kings GM needs. But he’s been able to do it in the shadows.

In his first media interview since his firing in Montreal on Nov. 28, 2021, Bergevin touched on a number of topics with The Athletic.

Let’s dive in.

Rejecting a Canadiens extension

Bergevin says Habs owner Geoff Molson approached him with a contract extension right after the team reached the ’21 Cup Final. His contract was expiring a year later.

“I decided that for me, it was best to move forward,” Bergevin said. “Time had come. It was good for both of us to move in a different direction. Geoff was very good, very fair. But I told him, ‘Geoff, I’m going to finish my last year that’s left and then I’m going to move on.’ He was good with that. He understood.”

The reality was that Bergevin was pretty much fried by one of the sport’s most demanding jobs. And not just from a hockey point of view.

“COVID took a toll on me — not physically, but as you know Montreal, Quebec, was really strict with the rules on COVID, and all my kids were in the States,” Bergevin said. “There was a 14-day quarantine then (once entering Quebec). I didn’t see my kids for almost a year.

“When Geoff made me the offer, I just felt there was no light at the end of the tunnel. The whole COVID thing for me beat me up, mentally, not seeing my kids.”

As it turns out, with Shea Weber playing his last NHL game in that 2021 Cup Final and Carey Price missing almost all of the following season, the end of an era for Bergevin’s team was happening even more quickly than anyone would have predicted. A 6-15-2 start to the season led to Bergevin’s firing.

“I knew a change was coming (because they had mutually agreed it was his last season), but it’s always a shock even though you prepare for it,” Bergevin said. “It was done the right way from Geoff’s side.”

The toll of the job

Before Bergevin landed in Montreal as Habs GM on May 2, 2012, he was known in hockey circles for his sense of humor. During his playing career and then working his way up the scouting ranks with the Chicago Blackhawks, he was the life of the party.

This is the guy who once picked up a plant walking out of a GMs meeting in Florida to avoid the cameras.

This is one creative way to avoid being spotted. #Canadiens GM Marc Bergevin hides behind a plant and (almost) slips right past everyone. pic.twitter.com/XHEk12Ev2Z

— Sportsnet (@Sportsnet) March 6, 2017

But a decade in that Habs job, through all the drama, chipped away at that personable, funny guy. The strain of the job was evident on his face by the end.

“Yeah that’s fair,” Bergevin said. “And it’s not like you change as a person, but you’re more on your guard because you feel like you have a spotlight on you every second of the day. And everything you said could be picked apart. So you’re more on your guard.

“But honestly, I enjoyed every second of my time there in Montreal. Even though there were times I didn’t feel like I did. But now that I can look back after a few years, yeah.”

He feels the good moves outweighed the mistakes, but yes, obviously, there were mistakes.

“Looking back I feel our average was pretty good,” he said.

Trader Bergevin

One of the characteristics of Bergevin’s time in Montreal was smaller to medium moves that ended up being beneficial. They all add up.

Acquiring Marco Scandella for a fourth-round pick from the Buffalo Sabres, then flipping him to the St. Louis Blues seven weeks later for second- and fourth-round picks.

Getting Brett Kulak from the Calgary Flames for Matt Taormina and Rinat Valiev.

One that wasn’t seen as big at the time: Getting Phillip Danault and a second-rounder from Chicago for pending UFAs Dale Weise and Tomas Fleischmann. That second-round pick became Alexander Romanov.

“I learned from Rick Dudley,” Bergevin said. “He said once to me, ‘Berg, you can’t go for the home run all the time. Sometimes you make your team better a little bit here, a little bit there. And eventually you get to where you want to be.’ I always kept that in mind. I think we did that in Montreal. We hit a lot of singles.”

Obviously, he also swung for the fences on some trades, including P.K. Subban for Shea Weber in June 2016.

“P.K. was a very good player, but we needed something different,” Bergevin said. “To get Shea Weber, you had to give up a pretty good asset. I think it worked out for both teams. Because both teams went to the Final. Nashville did with P.K. (in 2017), and we did with Shea.

“When a trade is made, both GMs think it’s going to work out for their teams, but I think the best ones are the ones that do actually work out for both teams.”

Bergevin was invited by Weber to his recent Hockey Hall of Fame induction, which was special for him.

“I’m glad that I went,” Bergevin said. “I told him, ‘I’m honored you’re asking me to go.’ And he said, ‘Berg, I want you to be there.’ That meant a lot to me.”

The Carolina offer sheets

The Habs made huge news on July 1, 2019, when they signed star center Sebastian Aho to an offer sheet. The five-year, $42.295 million was front-loaded and mostly made up of signing bonuses, including $11.3 million in July 2019 and $9.87 million in July 2020. The gamble for Montreal was that Hurricanes owner Tom Dundon wouldn’t have the stomach to pay that money up front. But Dundon didn’t blink.

In retrospect, Bergevin thinks he could have done it differently.

“Aho was the right player to give an offer sheet to, but I wish it would have been a different offer sheet,” Bergevin said. “Would I take that back? Yes. But honestly, at the time, we thought we would get the player based on the signing bonuses, which (Tom) Dundon matched. It ended up being a good contract for them.

“Lesson learned, honestly. Lesson learned. If I ever become a GM again, that’s a lesson I can use moving forward if it happens.”

The offer sheet also made mortal enemies, at the time, of owners Dundon and Molson. That fueled Carolina’s revenge offer sheet on Jesperi Kotkaniemi in August 2021, a one-year, $6.1 million deal.

The Habs didn’t match.

“He wasn’t going to do a long-term deal with us because he wanted a change of scenery,” Bergevin said of Kotkaniemi.

And well, the Canadiens didn’t feel Kotkaniemi was worth $6.1 million. So that decision wasn’t hard.

Carolina GM Don Waddell did reach out to see if a trade could be worked out instead. The rumor at the time was that Bergevin tried to get a young Seth Jarvis back.

“That’s true,” he confirmed.

Waddell, not surprisingly, didn’t want to move Jarvis, who was drafted 13th the previous year.

Drafting Kotkaniemi third in the 2018 draft was a decision fueled by a desperate need at center for the Habs. Obviously taking him one spot ahead of winger Brady Tkachuk, who went next to the Ottawa Senators, is tough to digest for Habs fans now.

“I look back at that, honestly, if you remember, Brady had a really tough season at BU,” Bergevin said. “He didn’t score for a long time. The skating was an issue. At the time in Montreal, all I would hear is (Filip) Zadina, Zadina, Zadina … because he was playing in Halifax (of the Quebec League).

“Obviously, now you would say, ‘Tkachuk, well of course.’”

But the need to draft a center was real.

“We didn’t have any centermen, and we were looking at a guy that was a tall, lanky center,” Bergevin said. “He had some good hockey as a 17-year-old. I wish KK the best. I think there’s more there, but time will tell.”

Drafting Mailloux

Bergevin’s last draft as Habs GM brought his most controversial moment, stunning the hockey world by taking Logan Mailloux 31st in 2021.

Mailloux had asked NHL teams not to draft him after reports surfaced that he was convicted and fined in a Swedish court in December 2020 for disseminating offensive photography. He had taken a photo of a woman performing a sex act without her consent and circulated it among some teammates.

The Habs took him anyway. Bergevin at the time described what Mailloux had done as “unacceptable,” but many felt, as The Athletic’s Arpon Basu wrote, that the pick signaled that for the Canadiens, “Improving their hockey team is more important than basic, common decency.”

The story has died down over time, in part because it sounds like Mailloux has put in work to improve and educate himself. He remains part of the organization, has played six NHL games and is currently with AHL Laval.

“It’s nice to see the young man has done the necessary things, to earn a second chance,” Bergevin said, declining to say anything else on the matter.

I suspect his decision not to say more comes down to the regrettable decision involving other people around him in the organization. Most notably, of course, ownership signed off on it.

Whatever the case, if Bergevin is to become an NHL GM again one day, he will have to answer this question in more detail as part of his interview process with his next NHL owner.

What he left behind

Current Canadiens leadership inherited good young players, such as Nick Suzuki and Cole Caufield, but also, it must be pointed out, some hefty contracts in Brendan Gallagher and Josh Anderson.

But Bergevin feels he left Jeff Gorton and Kent Hughes decent pieces to rebuild with.

“I never traded a first-round pick when I was there,” Bergevin said. “Not that I wouldn’t, but I didn’t. And you can look at the draft picks I left them. And I’m proud of that. I didn’t put that franchise in a bad spot. People might argue that, but I don’t know where you would argue that.”

Gallagher’s six-year, $39 million extension, signed in October 2020 and expiring in 2027, is one some would point to, although he’s had a renaissance season in 2024-25.

“He had three years of 30 goals in a row (before signing the extension),” Bergevin said. “You have to pay for that. Every GM sometimes gives one or two years too much in contracts.”

And yes, the Carey Price contract is still on Montreal’s books through 2026. Bergevin signed Price to an eight-year, $84-million extension July 2, 2017.

Of course it was too many years, but the alternative was to let the best goalie in the world walk a year later.

“You had to sign him, but then injuries … nobody knew that — he didn’t know that — would happen,” Bergevin said.

Before the extension was signed, did other teams call to gauge where things were with Price to see if a trade was possible? Like maybe at the draft?

Nope.

“Nobody ever called,” Bergevin said. Because it was obvious the Habs were going to do all they could to sign Price.

Life with the Kings

As senior adviser, Bergevin travels to scout games and spends time with the Kings coaching staff every week.

“I’ll come in most days and be part of all our discussions as a group,” Bergevin said. “I’ll watch other games, other teams, for either trades or free agency.”

Last week, Bergevin went to games in Vegas, Utah, Philadelphia and Chicago.

Bergevin played with Blake and Kings president Luc Robitaille on Canada’s world championship gold medal team in 1994. They remained close afterward.

The Kings hired him in January 2022.

“They wanted a different set of eyes,” Bergevin said.

“Marc has been a terrific addition to our staff,” Blake said via text. “Really enjoys the scouting aspect of managing. Has a busy travel schedule where he watches many live games with very thorough reports on players who may or may not fit with us. His welcoming personality allows him to interact with the coaching staff on a daily basis. Sharing his thoughts on our team and what is happening around the league.”

GM interviews

Bergevin has interviewed for three GM openings since leaving Montreal: in Toronto in May 2023 when Brad Treliving was hired, in Pittsburgh around the same time in 2023 when Kyle Dubas was hired and in Columbus this past offseason when Waddell got the gig.

“When teams reach out, it’s always good to do it,” Bergevin said.

Treliving was always the front-runner for the Toronto job, but Bergevin appreciated interviewing with Leafs president Brendan Shanahan.

“I knew Toronto a bit better because of my days with Montreal,” Bergevin said. “But Tree is a good general manager. After the announcement was made with Tree, I ran into Shanny and said, ‘Thank you for the opportunity.’

“There’s no hard feelings that I wasn’t picked. It’s a business. I wished him the best.”

So what’s next?

No doubt there will be more GM interviews, but whether or not that produces another GM gig remains to be seen.

“I’m in a good place here with Blakey and the staff. I really am,” Bergevin said. “If it turns out that I stay here for three, four, five years instead, I’m really good with that. But do I want to try again? I think we did enough good things in Montreal to have another crack at it. But that’s not my decision.

“I’ve never stopped working since the day I got let go. I’ve stayed really in touch with the game and the players.”

Regardless of what the future holds, he’s now better able to appreciate his time as Habs GM.

“Geoff Molson was always supportive,” Bergevin said. “I have nothing but respect for him. And I wish the best of luck in Montreal. Because they have a great fan base, great ownership, and I know Kent and Gorts, and they’re good people. I wish everybody there the best. I really mean that.”

(Photo: Minas Panagiotakis / Getty Images)

The NFL’s Thanksgiving schedule delivers three-fourths of what could become the most dominant division since the league realigned in 2002.

The 2024 NFC North is the first division since the 1970 AFL-NFL merger to feature three teams with at least eight victories through Week 12, led by the 10-1 Detroit Lions, who have tied an all-time NFL mark for most victories in a season by at least 38 points (three, all outside the division).

With the Lions facing the division-rival Chicago Bears (4-7) in the early game Thursday before the 8-3 Green Bay Packers play the late game against the AFC East’s Miami Dolphins, the 2024 NFC North — which also includes the 9-2 Minnesota Vikings — stands apart. It could well decide who takes home the Lombardi Trophy.

The Lions (+260), Packers (+750) and Vikings (+850) are among the top seven in Super Bowl odds, per BetMGM, and the top four in odds to win the NFC, along with the Philadelphia Eagles (+325). The Lions remain Super Bowl favorites, comfortably ahead of the Kansas City Chiefs (+450), while the NFC North has the shortest odds to produce the champion at +175, half of the second-place AFC West (+350).

The chart below shows where all eight divisions have ranked each season since the league realigned in 2002 in point margin per game (X-axis) and win rate (Y-axis) in non-divisional games through the first 12 weeks of each season. The 2024 NFC North (red dot) ranks first among these 184 divisional seasons in average point margin (+9.5) and second in win rate (.765), per TruMedia.

Only the 2022 NFC East (26-7) had a better record than the 2024 NFC North (26-8) in non-division games through Week 12, but the current NFC North had a far better average point margin (+9.5 to +5.1) in these games.

Here’s what you need to know about where the NFC North stands and what it must do to become the most dominant division over a full season since realignment.

1. The NFC North is by far the most dominant division this season.

The scheduling rotation (which we’ll explore later) is part of the equation, but this level of dominance is extreme.

AFC North teams lead the way in total victories over opponents who currently have winning records (11) and total non-divisional victories in these games (nine). The NFC North is second with eight and six.

Since 2002, the NFC North’s +323 point margin ranks first by 64 points over the runner-up 2013 NFC West (+259) through Week 12. That is larger than the difference between the 2013 NFC West and the sixth-ranked division in that span, the 2011 NFC North (+200). The table below shows the only divisions since 2002 with PPG margins greater than 7.0 through Week 12, led by the 2024 NFC North.

2. Strong defense has been the key to the NFC North dominating its non-divisional schedule.

The 2024 NFC North ranks first among 184 divisions since 2002 in defensive EPA per play against non-division opponents, compared to a No. 69 ranking in offensive EPA per play.

All four NFC North teams rank among the NFL’s top 10 in defensive EPA per play across all games this season. They are all in the top five when isolating non-divisional games only. The Lions and Packers also rank among the top 10 on offense across all games and in non-division games.

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3. Dominating a weak AFC South accounts for 61 percent of the NFC North’s +323 point differential in non-division games.

NFC North teams are 8-0 with a +144 differential against the Jacksonville Jaguars and Tennessee Titans. They are 14-2 with a +197 differential against the full AFC South. Bad teams get blown out. The NFC North has played its share of them.

Forty-five percent of the +323 differential in non-division games stems from facing the Jaguars and Titans, while 61 percent stems from facing the AFC South overall.

The six other divisions are a combined 9-9 against the AFC South, with a +14 differential. That includes a 6-7 mark with a +21 differential for AFC East teams.

4. The NFC North has a 6-4 record against non-divisional opponents who had winning records through Week 12. Here’s a full accounting.

The Bears are the only NFC North team without a victory over a team that currently has a winning record. They are 0-3 in those matchups, headlined by their defeat at Washington on a Jayden Daniels Hail Mary. The rest of the NFC North has a 6-1 record in those games, with three victories over Houston, two over Arizona and one over Seattle.

The NFC North’s record would be 6-3 if we adjusted the parameters to feature non-divisional games against teams that had winning records at kickoff. Victories over Dallas, San Francisco and Tampa Bay would come into play.

5. NFC North teams play 10 more games against non-division opponents this season. Here’s what the division must do to become the most dominant since 2002.

The NFL pushes most division games later in the season for competitive reasons. That leaves only 10 remaining non-division games for the NFC North to build upon its dominance or fall in the rankings. Those games are listed below chronologically and with point spreads pulled together from various sources where available.

The 2013 NFC North holds the full-season record for PPG margin against non-divisional opponents since realignment (+359 in 40 games, for 8.975 per game). That division featured the 13-3 Super Bowl champion Seahawks, the Jim Harbaugh-coached 49ers (12-4), the Bruce Arians-coached Cardinals (10-6) and the 7-9 Rams.

NFC North teams must outscore their 10 remaining non-divisional opponents by 72 points to beat the 2013 NFC West for the best full-season differential since 2002. That would leave the division +395 in 44 games for a +8.977 PPG differential.

The best full-season record against non-divisional opponents since 2002 is shared by the 2013 NFC West and the 2007 NFC South at 30-10 (.750). The NFC North (currently .765 at 26-8) would equal that mark with a 7-3 finish against foes outside the division.

The best team in the NFC North (Detroit) will be at home for the division’s toughest remaining opponent (Buffalo). The Seahawks’ recent improvement on defense could complicate efforts for Chicago, Minnesota and Green Bay to win at Seattle. The 49ers’ decline could help Chicago (Week 14) and Detroit (Week 17).

Green Bay and Minnesota can set the tone in Week 13. Both are favored at home against non-division opponents.

(Photo of Josh Jacobs, center, and three Lions defenders: Stacy Revere / Getty Images)

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