The Houston Texans will host the Los Angeles Chargers in an AFC wild-card game on Saturday that will kick off at 4:30 p.m. ET and 3:30 p.m. local. If this sounds vaguely familiar, it's because the Texans own the early Saturday playoff window with a streak that is both unprecedented and seems extremely unlikely to ever be matched.

All eight times the Texans have been involved in the wild-card round, they have been given the same start time. Presidents come and go. Time ticks away. The networks, announcers and Houston starting quarterbacks change but this stays constant.

Houston has hosted the previous seven contests and gone 5-2 in those matchups. They have yet to carry enough momentum to win in the next round and secure an AFC championship spot.

There are no shortage of jokes about the oddity as leading off the playoff action is seen as the least desirable of all the windows. A more positive way of looking at it for Texans fans is that they save themselves many hours of stress waiting around for the elimination games to begin. Some people may actually prefer 4:30 p.m. on Saturday than waiting through work on Monday for that newish wild-card finale.

It actually looked like another time slot could be in play for the Texans this year as they got off to a red-hot 6-2 start and were a threat to challenge for the No. 1 seed. But a 4-5 finish once again put them in a spot to do the same thing for an eighth time.

This is not exactly a record that franchises aspire to, but it's also worth considering if there's any chance another team will ever come close to the consistency. It would have to be one from a smallish media market (although Houston is the fourth-biggest city in America) with relatively low national cache. then that team would have to be good enough to make the postseason eight times in 14 years without being so good that prime-time rights holders would start a bidding war. Lay it all out and it hardly seems possible even if, by some bizarre set of circumstances, a franchise tried to do it.

Also, with CJ Stroud under center, Houston is conceivably set up for future playoff pushes. So it may not stop at eight. In a few years we could see the streak reach double-digits. Truly something to behold.

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This article was originally published on www.si.com as Texans Have Quietly Put Together One of the More Amazing Streaks in Sports.

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