The Longest Playoff Droughts in the NFL

The longest active playoff drought in the NFL belongs to the New York Jets, who have not made the postseason since the 2010 season, a run of 15 straight years through 2025. The longest drought in league history, though, is 25 consecutive seasons, a mark shared by the old Chicago/St. Louis Cardinals and by Washington in the earlier decades of pro football.

A playoff drought is one of the most quietly painful records in sports. It does not come from a single embarrassing game but from years of near-misses, false dawns and lost seasons stacked on top of one another. Here is how the NFL’s longest droughts rank, both the all-time streaks and the ones still running, all figures through the 2025 season.

The record: 25 straight seasons

The all-time NFL record for consecutive seasons without a playoff appearance is 25, and two franchises share it. The Chicago and later St. Louis Cardinals missed the postseason every year from 1949 through 1973, a quarter-century in the wilderness for one of the league’s oldest clubs. Washington matched that with its own 25-season drought from 1946 to 1970, ending only when the team rebuilt into a contender at the start of the 1970s.

Both streaks came in an era when the playoff field was tiny, often just two teams meeting for the championship, so qualifying was far harder than it is today. That context matters, but the number still stands as the benchmark for sustained futility.

The full leaderboard of longest droughts

The table below ranks the longest playoff droughts in NFL history, mixing the all-time streaks with the modern era’s most notable dry spells. Active droughts are marked with an asterisk.

Team	Seasons	Span	Status
Chicago/St. Louis Cardinals	25	1949-1973	Ended
Washington	25	1946-1970	Ended
Buffalo Bills	17	2000-2016	Ended
Cleveland Browns	17	2003-2019	Ended
New York Jets*	15	2011-2025	Active
Detroit Lions	12	2000-2011	Ended

The two 25-season streaks lead comfortably. Below them, the modern era’s grimmest runs cluster in the 12-to-17 range, including two 17-year droughts that both ended dramatically: the Bills in 2017 and the Browns in 2020.

The Jets and the longest active drought

Through 2025 the New York Jets carry the NFL’s longest active drought, and in fact the longest in any of the four major North American pro sports leagues. Their last postseason trip came after the 2010 season, when Rex Ryan’s team reached its second straight AFC Championship Game. Since then, a revolving door of quarterbacks and coaches has kept them out year after year.

Every season the drought grows, the pressure to end it climbs. Behind the Jets, the next-longest active droughts belong to teams that last reached the playoffs in the late 2010s, none of them close to the Jets’ streak yet.

The Bills and Browns: how long droughts end

The two modern 17-season droughts are instructive because they show how these streaks finally break. The Buffalo Bills spent 2000 through 2016 outside the playoffs before ending it in 2017, then transformed into a perennial contender once they drafted Josh Allen. The Cleveland Browns’ 17-year drought (2003-2019) ended in 2020 behind a young core and a new coaching staff.

In both cases, the drought ended not with a gradual climb but with a franchise-altering quarterback and a front office finally getting the roster right. That is usually the pattern: long droughts persist through the middle years and break suddenly when a team lands its franchise passer.

Why playoff droughts matter

A long playoff drought is a measure of organizational health as much as on-field talent. Teams stuck in these streaks are often the same ones that show up in our look at the worst records in NFL history and the franchises with the most NFL losses, because sustained losing and postseason absence tend to travel together.

The flip side is what makes ending a drought so powerful. The best organizations, the kind featured among the most valuable NFL teams, rarely stay out for long, and the ones chasing the best regular-season record in NFL history are usually the ones that climbed fastest out of a dry spell.

The short version: the Jets own the NFL’s longest active playoff drought at 15 seasons through 2025, the modern record for a completed drought is 17 years, and the all-time mark is 25 straight seasons, shared by the Cardinals and Washington.