Early-season overreactions are easy to laugh off because, well, it's early. But late-season overreactions can be just as dangerous and misleading.
The last four weeks of the NFL season are exactly as small a sample size as the first four. (That's math, folks. You can check it.) While December games seem to carry more import because the stakes are better-defined and feel more fraught, they can produce overreactions every bit as silly as the ones we have in September.
So this is a warning, as we embark upon our weekly exercise, for teams not to base too much of their playoff planning or offseason decision-making on what they've seen from a couple of weeks toward the end of the year.