The NFL is back, kicking off Week 1 with a loaded slate that may have included the game of the year.
As Ryan Glasspiegel wrote on X/Twitter: “The NFL just hits like crack. There’s nothing like it.”
Dozens of hours of football later, here’s the good, the bad, and the ugly from Week 1.
The Good:
NBC Sports got off to an incredible start via Sunday night’s telecast of Josh Allen and the Bills’ 41–40 comeback win over Lamar Jackson and the Ravens. The Bills’ late-game comeback was almost statistically impossible. With the Ravens holding a 40–25 lead with only 4:48 left in the fourth quarter, Baltimore had a 99.1% chance of victory, according to ESPN Analytics. But you have to play until the clock reads zero, especially with reigning MVP Josh Allen under center for the Bills.
The game featured a duel between the league’s last two MVPs. NBC’s broadcast team of Mike Tirico and Cris Collinsworth brought their A game.
Collinsworth said powerful Ravens running back Derrick Henry simply “embarrasses” would-be tacklers like safety Cole Bishop of the Bills. “Watch what happens when you try to take on the big guy Derrick Henry. He just sizes you up and throws that left jab,” noted Collinsworth as viewers saw the 6-foot-2, 252-pound Henry stiff-arm Bishop to the turf. Then Tirico put a bow on what viewers witnessed. “1 and 2 in the MVP voting. It’s one of those games you feel like the guy who’s got the ball last wins. And they weren’t gonna let Lamar Jackson get it. And Josh Allen held onto it,” he said. “If you’ve never seen a game like that before, you’re right. That’s the first 41–40 final score in the 106-year history of the National Football League.”
After a rocky first season in the booth for Fox Sports, Tom Brady seemed more relaxed during his call of the Commanders’ 21–6 win over the Giants. The seven-time Super Bowl winner’s best moment came when he noted he always liked to keep a timeout in his back pocket for a last-second field goal. That proved prescient when the lack of a timeout prevented Washington from kicking an easy field goal at the end of the first half. “Big mistake there by the Commanders,” Brady said. Brady also correctly predicted an intentional grounding penalty against Commanders QB Jayden Daniels. I also liked an enthusiastic Brady dropping a John Madden–like “BOOM” on viewers when rookie Giants running back Cam Skattebo repeatedly bowled over tacklers. “When you watch film study, believe me, everybody on the offense is going to be loving watching Skattebo do that to the linebackers on the other side of the ball,” he said.
CBS analyst J.J. Watt showed impressive chemistry with play-by-play partner Ian Eagle, which bodes well for the network’s new, No. 2 broadcast team. The future Hall of Famer even had his own “Romostradamus” moment, correctly predicting a Justin Fields bootleg for a Jets TD. “There it is!” noted Watt. It’s very important for ex-players turned game-callers to make a good first impression. Former Cowboys tight end Jason Witten, for example, had an awful start on ESPN’s Monday Night Football—and never lived it down. Right now, Watt is off to a great start with viewers and critics alike.
Peyton and Eli Manning started fast on Monday night’s ManningCast, with a loaded guest lineup that included Saquon Barkley, Randy Moss, and Bill Murray. But the highlight was Eli reporting that Peyton hand-wrote two letters inviting Pope Leo XIV, a Chicago native, to appear on the Monday Night Football alt-cast. “I couldn’t close the Pope. But I made the effort. That’s the kind of effort we make here at ESPN2.”
The Bad:
YouTube drew a disappointing 17.3 million global viewers for its Friday night stream of the Chargers’ 27–21 win over the Chiefs—and 16.2 million of that came from the U.S. That’s a surprisingly low number considering the game featured the league’s No. 1 draw—Patrick Mahomes’s Chiefs—on a free platform. Then again, the NFL almost never plays games on Friday nights due to the Sports Broadcasting Act of 1961 which protects high school and college football. It still has work to do when it comes to attracting a global audience.
Former Fox Sports executive Patrick Crakes wasn’t surprised by the number. “This game did about what it should have done if one has a firm grasp of both streaming (in general) & YouTube (in particular) echo systems. … Also, note that 6% of viewing came from broadcast affiliates in home markets via PayTV & OTA. … Not sure whose expectations weren’t met, but those were never reasonable…” he tweeted.
NFL RedZone’s beloved commercial-free format officially ended, as NFL Network showed four 15-second ads in a split-screen format. No, the sky didn’t fall. No, it didn’t have anything to do with ESPN. But Ad Creep tends to move in only one direction—and I wouldn’t be surprised to see more advertising injected into the whip-around show’s seven-hour format. It’s simply too juicy a revenue opportunity for NFLN. As Mike Florio wrote on ProFootballTalk: “For NFL fans, RedZone Channel has been beloved in large part because it was, as we were always assured at the start of the broadcast, ‘Seven hours of commercial-free football.’ The football is no longer commercial-free, and that makes RedZone Channel worse.”
I thought Tony Romo of CBS Sports went overboard with his effusive praise for QB Jared Goff of the Lions while the Packers and Green Bay QB Jordan Love were dominating Detroit on their way to a 27–13 win. In fact, the Lions’ offense looked like a shell of itself without former offensive coordinator Ben Johnson. “Where was the hard play-action? Where’s the vertical passing game, the deep crossers, all those types of things? No trick plays, no nothing,” asked Rex Ryan on ESPN’s Get Up on Monday. “To me, it looked very vanilla. They were getting whipped on the interior and they became a checkdown-Charlie offense, almost unwatchable. You went from the very best offense in the league, damn near in the history of the league, to what I saw yesterday; that’s a bad sign.”
The Ugly:
Everybody loves the enthusiasm of the Bills Mafia. But there was no excuse for the fan who NBC cameras caught shoving Lamar Jackson and DeAndre Hopkins. That fan was ejected from the game Sunday night. He’s now been indefinitely banned from NFL stadiums per ESPN’s Adam Schefter. A fan alsothrew a green dildo on the field in Cleveland during Fox’s telecast of Bengals-Browns, was copying others who have thrown dildos on the court during WNBA games.
Best Quotes:
Among the reasons why TV networks want to hire Mike Tomlin if he leaves coaching: He’s great at delivering pithy, interesting sound bites. After Pittsburgh’s Chris Boswell nailed a 60-yard field goal to beat the Jets, Tomlin said, “Our kicker is a serial killer. Man, he’s got a low pulse rate. He can’t wait to deliver.”
Speaking of the Jets, Steelers quarterback Aaron Rodgers took a shot at his former club after Pittsburgh’s 34–32 win. When Rodgers was asked by a reporter whether he was happy to beat Jets coach Aaron Glenn (who showed him the door in New York), the QB took aim at the franchise. “I was happy to beat everybody associated with the Jets,” he said.
