If you have watched football at any point this season, you know the one. Kylie is understandably concerned about having what appears to be 200 people over to their house on Sunday because everyone wants to watch a different game, and she would like to be a good host who cares about the needs and wants of her guests. Jason, meanwhile, reassures his increasingly concerned wife that everything will be fine because they have YouTube TV and NFL Sunday Ticket. This commercial has now entered the official canon of the Weekend Watchlist, partially because I have seen it approximately 100,000,000,000 times and expect to see it 100,000,000,000 more before the season ends, but mostly because I cannot stop thinking about the ludicrousness of Jason’s solution.

How is this party actually going to work? There are 20 people in that living room. Even with multiview, you need at least four televisions before we can begin discussing whether everybody’s needs have been accommodated, and Jason does not appear remotely concerned about this logistical nightmare. Kylie is trying to make sure their friends feel welcomed and cared for, while her husband seems completely satisfied that he has purchased access to every football game and therefore completed his responsibilities as host. Buddy, the problem was never whether you could watch Jaguars-Patriots. The problem is that somebody in your living room wants Jaguars-Patriots while six other people want Chargers-Bills, another group wants something else entirely and you appear to own one television. How? You’re a millionaire!

Maybe this is why I feel such kinship with Kylie Kelce. The entire purpose of the Weekend Watchlist is solving the problem Jason refuses to acknowledge. You have one television, maybe two if you are sufficiently committed to the cause, and an unreasonable number of football games competing for your attention. Somebody has to make the difficult decisions around here.

Apparently it will not be Jason.

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Then it’s time for EVERY game in NFL Week 3. Can the Rams keep rolling when they travel to Denver for a fascinating Sunday Night Football matchup? What do we make of the Bills, Chargers, Ravens, Cowboys, Eagles and the rest of the league after two weeks? Week 3 is still early, but we’re getting awfully close to the point where the things we thought we knew in August have to give way to what these teams are actually showing us.

Finally, club soccer is taking a break, but The Kickoff isn’t. Seth looks back at the latest Premier League weekend before turning toward the USMNT and the beginning of a new cycle under Mauricio Pochettino. What should we expect from 16-year-old Cavan Sullivan as he joins the senior national team? What should the United States be trying to accomplish during this international window? And, because international soccer apparently cannot be simple, Seth explains what exactly the UEFA Nations League is and why you should care about it.

Be sure to let us know what you think, SUBSCRIBE to The Football Corner on YouTube and use the chapter markers to jump directly to whatever part of this completely unreasonable football weekend you care about.

00:00 Introduction to The Kickoff

05:52 College Football Showdown: Ole Miss vs. Florida

15:42 Texas at Tennessee

25:55 Iowa at Michigan

32:09 Oregon at USC

39:40 Texas A&M at LSU

46:47 Missouri at Mississippi State

49:35 Boise State at Western Michigan

53:15 Oklahoma State at West Virginia

55:49 Wake Forest at Louisville

58:29 Oklahoma at Georgia

01:02:19 Rapid Fire College Football Previews

01:07:12 Previewing NFL Week 3

01:09:20 Falcons at Packers

01:15:39 Rams at Broncos

01:24:56 Ravens at Cowboys

01:32:06 Eagles at Bears

01:36:34 Raiders at Saints

01:39:32 Chargers at Bills

01:43:33 Panthers at Browns

01:45:52 Texans at Colts

01:49:06 Bengals at Steelers

01:51:32 Patriots at Jaguars

01:55:53 Rapid Fire Predictions for Week 3

02:00:28 The International Break is Here

02:02:07 The Quickest Premier League Recap Of All Time

02:04:43 The Road to 2023 Begins for the USMNT

02:14:03 Understanding the UEFA Nations League

02:26:30 International Break: A Pause in Premier League Action

02:30:31 Recap of Premier League Highlights

02:37:43 US Men’s National Team: A New Cycle Begins

02:49:34 Understanding the UEFA Nations League

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Every football season deserves to be remembered.

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This is a free excerpt from The Football Notebook. To read the full article, click the link below.

Georgia’s 45-17 win over Arkansas wasn’t much of a football game, and I’m not going to pretend otherwise for the sake of filling space. Georgia showed up in Fayetteville, realized fairly quickly that Arkansas wasn’t going to provide much resistance and essentially treated the game like a particularly well-attended Saturday practice. At one point, the Bulldogs’ offensive and defensive linemen were apparently using television timeouts to get extra work in because the actual game wasn’t providing enough of it. I cannot think of many more depressing ways to describe the state of a football program than the other team decided to squeeze in some practice reps during commercials.

The empty seats probably said more about Arkansas than anything that happened between the lines. Fayetteville is supposed to be one of those places where college football consumes the weekend, so watching large portions of the stadium sit empty for an SEC game against Georgia should concern everyone involved. Fans didn’t suddenly stop caring about Arkansas football. If anything, they’re staying home because they care enough to be completely exhausted by what it has become.

I don’t think most of that anger is directed at Ryan Silverfield, either. Sure, there are probably a few people who decided they were out on him by halftime Saturday because college football fans are college football fans, and somebody somewhere has probably already identified the perfect replacement on a message board. Most people understand Silverfield inherited this mess. He has been in Fayetteville for a matter of months; the frustration has been building for closer to 15 years.

Arkansas has hired new coaches before, and every change comes with another invitation to believe the Razorbacks have finally figured it out. Sometimes they even provide enough evidence to make that belief feel reasonable for a while before everyone eventually ends up having the same conversation with a different name occupying the office. There are only so many times you can sell people a fresh start before they begin wondering why the starting point never seems to change.

And Arkansas should not be this hopeless. Nobody is asking the Razorbacks to become Georgia, because asking basically anybody to become Georgia is a good way to spend the next decade miserable. But this is a program with a fan base that desperately wants to support it, located in a state where finding wealthy companies is not exactly an elaborate scavenger hunt. Arkansas doesn’t need to become a permanent national championship contender for people to feel good about the direction of the program. It just needs to stop making competence feel like some grand ambition.

That responsibility extends well beyond Silverfield. Arkansas has changed the person wearing the headset enough times to know that another coaching search cannot be the answer to every problem, particularly when so many of the same problems seem to survive each change. Eventually, the people making the hires and deciding how the program operates have to answer for why the results keep looking so familiar.

The folks are pissed off — excuse my language — and they have every right to be. They’ve heard about plans before and waited through rebuilds that eventually led to another rebuild. Empty seats against Georgia aren’t evidence that Arkansas fans have stopped caring. They’re evidence that asking them to keep proving how much they care while giving them so little in return has finally gotten old.

Something has to change, and for once, Arkansas might want to start somewhere other than the head coach’s office.

This is a free excerpt from The Football Notebook. To read the full article, click the link below.

As late as last week, I got on the microphone on The Matchbook and declared that Arsenal might not lose a Premier League game until December or January. Dropping points somewhere along the way seemed inevitable because even the best teams occasionally spend 90 minutes kicking the ball directly at a goalkeeper who has randomly decided to become a demigod, but I genuinely struggled to find an upcoming fixture where an outright defeat seemed particularly likely.

Brighton heard me, apparently.

Beating one of the biggest clubs in England barely qualifies as surprising for Brighton anymore. The Seagulls have spent years cycling through managers and selling excellent players for enormous sums before somehow finding another collection capable of making a Big Six team absolutely miserable. Arsenal simply became the latest victim Saturday, losing 3-0 as Brighton turned a match against the defending champions into a rather lovely way to celebrate the club’s 125th anniversary.

There was something wonderfully satisfying about watching the game develop because every goal seemed to make the afternoon better than it had been a few minutes earlier. The first provided the initial jolt, the second made you wonder whether Arsenal was actually in serious trouble, and by the time the third went in, the Amex had turned into a party. It reminded me of sitting down for a really good meal and gradually discovering that the thing you ordered isn’t even necessarily the best part of it, because some side you barely considered has suddenly become the reason you’re going to remember the place. I don’t know. The metaphor got away from me a little bit there, but Brighton scored three goals and I had a lovely time watching it.

Arsenal will inevitably receive most of the attention because that’s usually how these things work. A title favorite loses and the immediate question becomes what went wrong with the title favorite, rather than spending much time considering whether the team on the other side might simply deserve some credit. Brighton has been doing this to England’s biggest clubs for years, though, and Saturday was another reminder that its ability to make far wealthier teams miserable has survived seemingly endless changes in personnel.

There isn’t much reason for Arsenal to panic. It’s just September, and every major goal remains available. It does put some of the more ambitious conversations on hold, including the one I was happily participating in about whether this team could go unbeaten. Every additional victory had made that possibility feel slightly less ridiculous, and Arsenal had looked difficult enough to disrupt that I had already started looking several months down the schedule for the first obvious place it might lose. Brighton saved me the trouble.

Not so fast, my friends. Not so fast indeed.

Welcome back to the Corner Poll, where the rankings are made up and the criteria remain intentionally vague.

If you’re new here, the idea is pretty simple. The Corner Poll ranks teams based on how I feel about them right now. Emphasis on the right now. Results obviously influence that, but this isn’t supposed to determine who would win on a neutral field. Expectations can change how I view a team just as easily as what happened on Saturday or Sunday, and sometimes the general feeling surrounding a team is enough to move it around.

There is no formula here. That’s very intentional.

Let’s rank some football teams.

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This is a free excerpt from The Football Notebook. To read the full article, click the link below.

There was a moment late Saturday night, with LSU desperately trying to erase an eight-point deficit and the entire state of Mississippi seemingly screaming at Lane Kiffin through their television screens, when Sam Leavitt’s pass was deflected and floated into the end zone. Jaylon Braxton was waiting there for it, and the second the Ole Miss defensive back secured the interception, Vaught-Hemingway Stadium released approximately nine months of pent-up emotion all at once.

Excuse me for my previous mistake. That wasn’t just “a moment.” It was the moment.

Ole Miss had waited for this from basically the second Kiffin decided he was leaving for LSU. There were plenty of reasons for Rebels fans to be angry about the departure itself, but the manner in which everything unfolded only made the breakup worse. Kiffin had built Ole Miss into something it had spent years trying to become, gotten the Rebels to the doorstep of genuine national championship contention and then decided the grass might be greener a few hours down the road in Baton Rouge. Ole Miss was left behind like the scorned lover in a relationship that had seemed to be going rather well right up until one person abruptly announced they were moving out.

Then the ex came back to town, and there was no attempt from Oxford to pretend everything was fine. Every camera shot of Kiffin standing on the opposing sideline felt a little surreal because this was his stadium until very recently, filled with people who used to celebrate everything he did and now wanted nothing more than to watch him fail. Ole Miss played like a team that understood exactly what the night meant, building a 24-7 halftime lead before LSU eventually recovered and tied the game at 24. For a few uncomfortable minutes, the possibility existed that Kiffin might actually walk back into Oxford and steal the ending everyone there had spent months imagining.

Trinidad Chambliss made sure he didn’t. Ole Miss regained the lead late, converted the two-point attempt to make it 32-24 and eventually watched Braxton intercept LSU’s final attempt to keep the game alive. Kiffin had returned to the place where he built his reputation into something considerably larger, faced the people he left behind and walked back out with his first loss as LSU’s coach.

Saturday also brought me back to the question I had when Kiffin left in the first place: Was LSU really worth giving all of this up?

College football has changed enough that I’m not sure those old assumptions still apply. NIL and the transfer portal have compressed the distance between programs that used to occupy entirely different levels of the sport, and Ole Miss is one of the clearest examples of what that new world looks like. Kiffin didn’t leave a program that had reached its ceiling and needed a miracle to go any further. He left one that, at the time of his departure, was about to make the College Football Playoff and had put itself in position to chase the same national championship he presumably went to LSU to pursue.

Baton Rouge also isn’t exactly famous for giving coaches unlimited time to figure things out, which only adds to the gamble of leaving a program where Kiffin had already built almost everything he needed. We won’t know whether he made the right decision for several years, and Saturday certainly didn’t settle the larger question.

It did give Ole Miss the answer it wanted for one night. The ex came back to town, and the scorned lover got its revenge.

The Cowboys bounced back with a convincing win over Washington, but the Commanders left Dallas with much bigger concerns after Jayden Daniels suffered another elbow injury. Caleb Williams also went down as the Vikings defense suffocated Chicago, while the Saints stunned Baltimore and the Broncos escaped against Jacksonville.

Seth and Zion break down every game from Sunday, including Cincinnati’s suddenly competent defense, the Jets finding an extremely Jets way to lose, Philadelphia surviving Tennessee, the Raiders’ surprising start and everything else from a strange Week 2 across the NFL.

Every football season deserves to be remembered.

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There was certainly enough football to justify the hours this week. Lane Kiffin returned to Oxford and discovered that Ole Miss fans haven’t spent the last nine months working toward forgiveness, Brighton made one of my more confident Premier League takes look stupid almost immediately and Big Noon Kickoff once again sent me searching for answers to questions nobody should have to ask about a pregame show. The Raiders are giving me dangerous ideas about Kirk Cousins, Manchester City and Sunderland briefly abandoned the concept of defending altogether and Arkansas reached the point where a 45-17 loss to Georgia somehow wasn’t the most depressing thing happening in Fayetteville.

Somewhere in the middle of all of that, I presumably ate and slept.

Let’s open the notebook.

Hell Hath No Fury Like Ole Miss Scorned

There was a moment late Saturday night, with LSU desperately trying to erase an eight-point deficit and the entire state of Mississippi seemingly screaming at Lane Kiffin through their television screens, when Sam Leavitt’s pass was deflected and floated into the end zone. Jaylon Braxton was waiting there for it, and the second the Ole Miss defensive back secured the interception, Vaught-Hemingway Stadium released approximately nine months of pent-up emotion all at once.

Excuse me for my previous mistake. That wasn’t just “a moment.” It was the moment.

Ole Miss had waited for this from basically the second Kiffin decided he was leaving for LSU. There were plenty of reasons for Rebels fans to be angry about the departure itself, but the manner in which everything unfolded only made the breakup worse. Kiffin had built Ole Miss into something it had spent years trying to become, gotten the Rebels to the doorstep of genuine national championship contention and then decided the grass might be greener a few hours down the road in Baton Rouge. Ole Miss was left behind like the scorned lover in a relationship that had seemed to be going rather well right up until one person abruptly announced they were moving out.

Read more

Seth Dowdle breaks down both games before getting into Louisville’s explosive win over SMU, Alabama outgunning Florida State, NC State producing one of the most ridiculous endings you will ever see, Florida’s increasingly fun offense and whatever exactly Clemson-North Carolina was.

Plus: Kamario Taylor is AMAZING, Georgia cruises past Arkansas and Friday night was great with Texas Tech-Houston and Miami-Wake Forest.

00:00 Welcome to After Saturday and Week 3

01:39 LSU at Ole Miss Reaction

21:31 Kentucky at Texas A&M Reaction

33:01 SMU at Louisville Reaction

40:06 Florida State at Alabama Reaction

47:11 NC State at Vanderbilt Reaction

53:41 Georgia at Arkansas Reaction

01:00:08 Florida at Auburn Reaction

01:03:51 North Carolina at Clemson Reaction

01:07:53 Mississippi State at South Carolina Reaction

01:09:57 Friday Night Spotlight

01:13:36 Rapid Fire Takeaways

Every football season deserves to be remembered.

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#CollegeFootball #CFB #OleMiss #LSU #TexasAM #KentuckyFootball

“Some might say we will find a brighter day.”
— Oasis, “Some Might Say”

Bournemouth’s European dreams aren’t hard to comprehend. This is a club that didn’t believe it could be anywhere close to these heights not all that long ago, mostly because there was very little reason to believe it could.

Bournemouth was a League Two side as recently as the 2009-10 season, having narrowly avoided dropping out of the Football League altogether the year before. The Cherries were promoted to League One that spring, spent three seasons there and found their way into the Championship by 2013. Two years later, Bournemouth was in the Premier League, completing a rise through English football that happened quickly enough that there probably wasn’t much time for anyone around the club to properly comprehend what was happening.

It has bounced between the top flight and second division since, though even that description makes Bournemouth’s recent history sound considerably more ordinary than it actually is. The club that once had to worry about its continued existence is currently expanding Vitality Stadium from just over 11,000 seats to more than 20,000, a project Bournemouth says will help secure its long-term success and sustainability. There is something fitting about that happening now, because the stadium itself has started to become one of the few remaining parts of Bournemouth that still looks like it belongs to the club it used to be.

Everything else has changed.

Bournemouth now operates like a fairly big deal on the European continent, and there are several reasons for that. The flood of money into the Premier League has lifted the entire country’s footballing infrastructure above much of the rest of Europe, meaning clubs that would traditionally be considered part of England’s middle class suddenly possess financial resources that would make historically significant teams elsewhere on the continent fairly jealous. Bournemouth has benefited enormously from that reality, but it has also done something important with the money: It has generally spent it well.

Last season was the culmination of all of that. Bournemouth finished sixth in the Premier League and qualified for the Europa League, turning something that would have sounded completely absurd 15 years ago into a fairly logical reward for becoming a very good football team.

That distinction feels important, because Bournemouth did not stumble into Europe as some sort of happy accident. The Cherries earned their way here, and on Thursday night they traveled to San Sebastián and provided perhaps the clearest indication yet that simply qualifying for the competition was never going to be enough.

Bournemouth beat Real Sociedad 2-1.

The setting alone made the whole thing feel slightly surreal. Bournemouth had waited its entire existence for a European night and was immediately sent to one of the great football cities in Spain to play a club that has spent plenty of time in continental competition. There was no gentle introduction to any of this, and Bournemouth didn’t appear particularly interested in asking for one.

Justin Kluivert thought he had scored the first European goal in club history after 11 minutes, only for the flag to initially go up for offside before VAR eventually restored what would have been an especially cruel thing to take away. Nine minutes later, Alex Scott found Rayan, whose header made it 2-0 and left Bournemouth in the unusual position of having waited more than a century to play European football before requiring only 20 minutes to become quite good at it.

Real Sociedad eventually made the evening considerably less comfortable. Sergio Gómez pulled one back after halftime, and Bournemouth had to spend much of the second half protecting what it had built, with Djordje Petrovic making a couple of important saves late to preserve the victory. There was nothing particularly easy about the final half-hour, but that probably made the whole thing more appropriate anyway. Bournemouth had spent too long trying to get here for its first European victory to arrive without at least a little suffering.

I am somebody who loves to find the underdog in sports and then root for it to succeed, occasionally well beyond the point of reason. Bournemouth easily fits into that category, and watching it thrive in a competition that nobody 15 years ago would’ve thought it could even compete in is such a wonderful sight for somebody who remains a lifelong wishful thinker, at least when it comes to sports.

There were almost certainly Bournemouth supporters watching League Two football in 2009 who allowed themselves to imagine something like Thursday night. That is part of what being a sports fan requires, convincing yourself of outcomes that all available information suggests are ridiculous because the alternative is admitting there might be a ceiling on how far your club can go. Bournemouth kept raising that ceiling until eventually there wasn’t much of one left.

What’s even crazier to me is that Bournemouth is no longer merely an interesting underdog in this Europa League. According to Opta’s model entering the competition, it was the favorite to win the entire thing, with a 14.3% chance of lifting the trophy. Benfica was narrowly behind at 14%, with Bayer Leverkusen at 10.2% and Union Saint-Gilloise at 8.6%, while Sunderland, Juventus, Crystal Palace and AC Milan rounded out the other prominent contenders.

That list is somewhat baffling to me, particularly because Juventus and Milan don’t even crack the top five. These are two of the biggest clubs in the history of European football, organizations with trophy cabinets Bournemouth could only dream of matching, particularly considering the Cherries had never even played a European game before Thursday. And yet here they all are, playing in the same competition with a statistical model suggesting Bournemouth has a better chance of winning it than either Italian giant.

It’s hard for me to believe that neither Juventus nor Milan will have success in this tournament given the resources and talent available to them, but the fact Bournemouth can even reasonably be mentioned alongside them speaks volumes about how dramatically the balance of European football has shifted. Ten years ago, the idea that Bournemouth and Juventus could enter a European competition as something approaching competitive equals would have been unimaginable. Even now, after everything that has happened, it sounds somewhat ludicrous.

The Premier League’s enormous financial advantage is obviously responsible for plenty of that. Bournemouth is not alone here, because the clubs occupying England’s tier below the traditional giants now have access to players and resources that would once have been reserved for teams regularly playing in the Champions League. You can see the same thing with Sunderland and Crystal Palace, and all three entered this Europa League campaign with a legitimate argument that they could go deep into the competition.

England’s representatives certainly did little in Matchweek 1 to discourage that idea. Sunderland beat AZ Alkmaar 1-0 at the Stadium of Light in what was an incredible scene in its own right, while Crystal Palace cruised past Lech Poznan 4-0 in South London. Bournemouth’s victory was different, though, because it happened away from home against Real Sociedad and because there was so much history packed into the simple act of the Cherries being there in the first place.

There is obviously a long way to go before anybody in Bournemouth needs to start figuring out where exactly a Europa League trophy parade would fit in a town that is still working on doubling the capacity of its stadium. A 14.3% chance of winning something remains, inconveniently, an 85.7% chance of not winning it, and European competitions have a habit of dealing rather harshly with anyone who starts planning for May in September.

But winning the Europa League is almost beside the point right now. Bournemouth has spent the better part of the last two decades arriving at places that once seemed completely unreasonable, only for each new destination to eventually become normal. League One gave way to the Championship, the Championship gave way to the Premier League and simply surviving in the Premier League eventually gave way to competing near the top of it.

Now the Cherries are in Europe, too, and Thursday night provided the latest adjustment to what Bournemouth supporters are allowed to consider normal. The strange part is no longer that Bournemouth has made it this far.

It’s that nobody should be particularly surprised if it goes further.

Just a couple hundred feet away from the Buffalo Bills’ new home lies the rubble of the old one, which feels almost a little too perfect.

Highmark Stadium opened Thursday night as a monument to what the Bills hope comes next, a shiny new building filled with all the modern amenities and general new-stadium smell that a couple billion dollars can buy. And then, right across the street, there is the place that contains almost everything Buffalo has spent the last half-century trying to outrun, slowly being reduced to concrete and twisted metal while the Bills start over again beside it.

The old stadium was where Bills fans learned, repeatedly and with almost comical thoroughness, that hope is a dangerous thing.

It started in 1973, and there were plenty of good memories mixed in with the bad. The Bills had some good seasons in the early-to-mid ’70s that ended in failure, while the latter years of that decade and much of the next were filled with so much despair that simply becoming relevant again would have qualified as progress. Then the hope returned in 1988, when Buffalo finally found its footing once more and began building toward something that felt considerably bigger.

That streak of excellence brought expectations, though, which ultimately strung along more sadness and despair alongside it. From 1990-93, the Bills made the Super Bowl four years in a row, first losing 20-19 to the New York Giants before falling to Washington the following season. Back-to-back failures against the Cowboys followed, completing what became known as the Four Falls of Buffalo and leaving behind a particularly cruel legacy: one of the greatest teams of its era, remembered as much for the four games it lost as all the ones it won.

Sports can be a little cruel like that.

In the years since the early ’90s, the Bills have desperately been looking for one more shot. A fifth chance to claim greatness. Season after season passed without it, and eventually Buffalo went from being the team that could not win the Super Bowl to being a team that would quite like to participate in the playoffs again. The 21st century was particularly unkind, as the Bills secured just one winning record over the first 13 years of the millennium.

It wasn’t until Josh Allen, and with him head coach Sean McDermott, arrived that hope sprung eternal again. Allen was originally a project when he was drafted out of Wyoming, the sort of quarterback prospect whose strengths were described in terms of what he might eventually become rather than what he already was. Then he became it, and suddenly Buffalo had the sort of quarterback every NFL team spends years searching for and most never actually find.

By the time the 2020s rolled around, the Bills were once again contenders for titles. This was wonderful news, except that being a contender meant Buffalo had once again exposed itself to the possibility of meaningful failure, and the Kansas City Chiefs were more than happy to provide it. Patrick Mahomes has become a recurring character in Bills history despite never actually playing for them, appearing every so often in January to remind Buffalo that having one of the best quarterbacks in the world is slightly less useful when somebody else has the other one.

Continuous playoff failure is almost worse than being an absolute failure. The bad years eventually become background noise; you complain about the team, watch anyway and get on with your Sunday. These Bills ask more of you. They spend four months making the Super Bowl feel plausible before requiring everyone to reckon with another season in which they were very good but not quite good enough.

Following 2025’s defeat in the AFC divisional round to the Denver Broncos, Buffalo decided it had finally seen enough of that particular arrangement. The Bills moved on from McDermott and pivoted by hiring then-offensive coordinator Joe Brady, Allen’s right-hand man. It was not a revolution so much as an adjustment, the sort of move a franchise makes when almost everything works and the fact that almost has become increasingly difficult to tolerate.

It was that pairing, the Bills hoped, that would lead Buffalo to the promised land.

A New Home and Another Reason to Believe

Which is how we arrived Thursday night, with the old stadium disappearing across the street and the new one filled for the first time with people who had decided, despite all available historical evidence, to believe again.

Buffalo entered on the heels of a 36-31 win over the vaunted Houston Texans, so there was already reason for some optimism. Detroit provided a useful second test because the Lions have their own Super Bowl aspirations and presumably did not travel to Western New York simply to admire the architecture. If this version of Buffalo really was different, or at least capable of being different, Thursday offered a decent opportunity to find out.

Here’s the Bills’ drive chart from Thursday night’s game, which probably just speaks for itself: touchdown, touchdown, touchdown, touchdown, punt, touchdown, punt, touchdown, end of game.

All of that came against a Detroit team that hopes to leave this season holding the Lombardi Trophy, and for much of the night, Buffalo made the whole thing look oddly uncomplicated. The Bills scored, gave the ball back, waited for Detroit to do whatever Detroit was going to do — usually nothing — and then went and scored again with what seemed like unlimited confidence.

It was impressive, to say the least.

But it was Allen’s efforts that really popped, which is a slightly ridiculous sentence to write about a quarterback whose efforts have been popping for the better part of six years.

The criticism of Allen has been rampant for years, though it is no longer really criticism of his ability. He has already settled that discussion. The question is whether all of the glorious regular-season success can eventually produce the postseason moment that Buffalo is still waiting for, because Allen does not yet have that marquee victory that ends with the Bills somewhere they have not been since the Four Falls.

Most of those problems have had to do with one team and one man in the Chiefs and Mahomes, although Denver was kind enough to diversify the heartbreak last season. That is not entirely Allen’s fault, of course, and reducing entire playoff losses to a quarterback’s personal record is one of the stranger habits football has developed. But quarterbacks receive an unreasonable amount of credit when everything works, so they tend to receive an unreasonable amount of responsibility when it doesn’t.

Yes, a 41-31 win over the Lions in September doesn’t change any of that. Far from it. There are still 15 more games for Buffalo to play this year, which is enough time for all of this hype and wonder to go down the drain several times over. We have been watching the NFL long enough to know that whatever appears undeniably true after Week 2 normally has a reasonable chance of looking hilarious by Thanksgiving.

Still, there is only so much skepticism you can reasonably maintain while watching the Bills score touchdowns on six possessions against a team that’s supposedly as good as Detroit could be this year.

The precision of Allen’s throws has been remarkable, but Buffalo also looks less reliant on him producing something preposterous every time the offense needs saving. James Cook can carry a substantial part of the operation out of the backfield, and Dalton Kincaid continues to grow into something more significant at tight end. That’s not to mention the steady stable of wide receivers Allen has at his disposal or Joe Brady, the man who entered into the unfamiliar role of head coach and appears to be passing the difficult test with flying colors.

All of that does not make them champions. It does not resolve anything about January, and it certainly does not guarantee that the latest attempt to get Allen to a Super Bowl will be any more successful than the previous ones. But there’s too much to like to completely dismiss these first two weeks as nothing but a mirage, because at some point skepticism becomes its own form of silliness.

The Bills are good. The Bills might even be great. This might be the year.

Let Hope Spring Eternal

Of course, it’s way too early to go about calling this the year, and anybody who has spent a meaningful amount of time caring about the Buffalo Bills knows how risky a proposition that truly is. The convenient thing about Thursday night was that nobody even needed to open a history book to remember why. They could simply walk outside, look a couple hundred feet away and see the old place being torn down.

Perhaps that is why the whole scene feels so appropriate. Buffalo has not escaped its history simply because it moved across the street, nor would Bills fans particularly want to; too much of what makes this team mean what it does is wrapped up in everything that happened over there. The losses matter because the hope mattered first.

And right now, hope is about as high as it has been in quite some time.

There will be plenty of opportunity for rationality later. January will arrive soon enough, bringing all the familiar anxiety with it, and Buffalo can worry then about Mahomes or Denver or whoever happens to be standing between it and that fifth Super Bowl appearance. Spending September preemptively worrying about how it might all end seems like an awfully miserable way to experience a team this fun and exciting.

So, as the old stadium is coming down and the new one is rocking, just let the Bills be.

Let hope spring eternal on the shores of Lake Erie.

The rules of the Weekend Watchlist are simple: I’ll tell you what deserves the main screen, what belongs on the second and where you should be flipping when things start to grab your attention. This is not every football game happening this weekend, but instead a curated list of what I believe to be the most important.

Let’s watch some football.

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This is a free excerpt from The Football Notebook. To read the full article, click the link below.

I talked about Tottenham’s inability to score last week because three Premier League matches without a goal seemed notable enough to warrant discussion. I assumed that by the time we reconvened here, Spurs would’ve managed to accidentally bounce one in off somebody’s shin and I could move on with my life. Apparently I underestimated this team’s commitment to the bit.

Four matches.

Still nothing.

(Yes, Tottenham has scored six goals this season when one includes its two Carabao Cup matches against Charlton Athletic and Liverpool. This challenge is specifically for the Premier League, where Spurs has decided that putting the ball into the back of the net is an optional activity.)

Tottenham’s latest attempt ended in another scoreless draw, extending a drought that has moved beyond being a strange opening stretch and into something legitimately concerning. Roberto De Zerbi can talk about needing to unblock the attack, and there are portions of matches where you can see the ideas he’s trying to implement. The problem arrives when Spurs gets anywhere near the goal and everybody suddenly appears to forget why they’re there.

So I’m attempting to fix the problem myself. I will run one mile for every goal Tottenham scores in the Premier League this season.

This feels like an arrangement where I can’t lose. Either Spurs continues its current trajectory and I get to spend the rest of the season living a wonderfully sedentary lifestyle, or Tottenham suddenly becomes one of the most prolific teams in England and forces me into the best shape of my life. Perhaps this is what De Zerbi has been waiting for. Maybe Savío has spent the last two weeks thinking about my cardiovascular health and simply needed reassurance that he could proceed.

The challenge starts whenever Tottenham decides to participate. In the meantime, let’s track how many miles I’ve had to run so far.

Oh, yeah… it’s zero. We’ll keep a running tally throughout the year. Right now, it appears Spurs is taking its time in running this race alongside me.

This week, we’re looking ahead to a loaded weekend across college football, the NFL and the Premier League.

Zion Trammell joins the show to preview College Football Week 3, including Lane Kiffin’s return to Oxford for LSU-Ole Miss, Houston-Texas Tech and the rest of the biggest games on Saturday.

Then Brett Bender joins to help build the perfect NFL Sunday. We draft 12 of the 13 Sunday afternoon games into our ideal viewing slates, preview the primetime matchups and ultimately leave one unfortunate game behind as The Biggest Loser.

Finally, we head to England for Premier League Matchweek 5. Tottenham and Aston Villa desperately need a win, Arsenal faces an intriguing trip to Brighton and Manchester United once again enters a weekend with plenty of questions to answer.

00:00 Introduction to The Kickoff

00:51 College Football Week 3 with Zion Trammell

56:26 NFL Week 3 with Brett Bender

02:12:19 Premier League Matchweek 5

Every football season deserves to be remembered.

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This is a free excerpt from The Football Notebook. To read the full article, click the link below.

Replay review across sports has somehow reached the point where having more technology occasionally seems to make officiating more confusing. Soccer is particularly gifted at this because offside should be a relatively straightforward concept, yet VAR has managed to turn some decisions into the sort of thing that requires diagrams and a minor in constitutional law to fully understand. Sunday’s Manchester Derby provided the latest example, and unlike plenty of officiating controversies that slowly materialize after everyone has watched 17 different slow-motion angles, this one felt questionable from the moment the goal was awarded.

Manchester City had been playing with 10 men since Phil Foden was sent off in the 23rd minute when Erling Haaland appeared to give his side the lead in the 60th. The goal was initially ruled out for offside before VAR took a nice long and hearty look at it and decided that, actually, everything was fine. Haaland’s positioning wasn’t really the issue. Enzo Fernández was standing in an offside position in front of Lisandro Martínez and made an attempt at the ball, which forced Martínez to react before it eventually reached Haaland at the back post. Inexplicably, however, VAR decided Fernández hadn’t interfered with play.

Yeah, Manchester United didn’t like that.

“I think it was offside,” Martínez said afterward. “And what I can’t understand is the rules. He [Fernández] was there, I went to him. He was there, in front of me. So that’s why [Erling] Haaland was free at the back.”

Martínez then went a little further, which I can’t particularly blame him for. He pointed out that referees visit clubs before every season to explain these rules and then somehow arrive at decisions like this anyway. “It’s unacceptable,” he said. “Because it’s the best league in the world, you have the best teams in the world, the best players in the world, and now we have to go home with this injustice.”

Manchester United manager Michael Carrick wasn’t doing much better trying to understand the explanation.

“The explanation I got was he wasn’t interfering with play, so I just don’t get it,” Carrick said. “He’s thrown himself at the ball six yards from goal and pretty much nearly touched it.”

That’s the part I can’t get past either. Fernández is standing directly in front of Martínez and actively attempting to reach a ball traveling across the six-yard box. Martínez has to account for him because ignoring a player attempting to score from six yards away would generally be considered a poor defensive strategy. Yet somehow we’re supposed to believe Fernández’s presence had nothing to do with what happened behind him.

Bull crap.

Respectfully.

Carrick continued: “It’s worrying if that’s really how the game’s seen by those who are officiating it. I think we all understand what that rule means, and it’s pretty obvious, you know? It’s pretty obvious. I think it’s as obvious as it gets.”

And then came the plot twist.

A couple of hours after the match, Pro Ref (short for Professional Game Referees), the official governing body of football officials in England, acknowledged that United was right. The organization said VAR “did not recognise the likely impact” of Fernández’s position and should have recommended an on-field review, adding that it had contacted Manchester United to acknowledge what it deemed “an error of judgement.”

Wonderful.

The weird part about this game is that while United was screwed, it also didn’t deserve to win. City played with 10 men for more than an hour at Old Trafford, and United never really looked capable of taking advantage of it. There was plenty of possession, but very little of it seemed particularly threatening, and the fact that City was even in a position to score the decisive goal with a man down is an indictment of how poorly United responded to the red card.

So, Manchester United got screwed. It was also very, very bad. And in the end, Manchester is blue.

This is a free excerpt from The Football Notebook. To read the full article, click the link below.

I was on the verge of turning off Texas-Ohio State at the beginning of the fourth quarter. The Buckeyes were up 23-3, Texas hadn’t shown much of anything offensively and I had already started mentally moving on to whatever game was next. There was little reason to believe the Longhorns were about to make things interesting, much less come all the way back and win the thing. Perhaps that was a bit of an overreaction.

Arch Manning spent the next 15 minutes showing exactly why Texas needs to stop being so careful with him. Steve Sarkisian can baby his quarterback all he wants, and I understand the thought process behind doing so when Manning is still relatively imperfect, but we’re reaching the point where the protection is becoming part of the problem. This is one of the most talented quarterbacks in college football surrounded by a roster loaded with players capable of making his life easier. Eventually you have to trust all of that talent and see what happens.

Texas didn’t really have another choice by the time the fourth quarter arrived. Being down 20 tends to simplify the decision-making process, so the Longhorns opened things up and Manning responded by looking like a completely different quarterback. He started pushing the ball downfield and suddenly Texas had an offense capable of putting Ohio State on its heels. It wasn’t particularly complicated. They just finally let Arch go to town.

That has to be the blueprint from here. Manning is going to make mistakes if Texas gives him more freedom, and there will inevitably be a Saturday where one of those mistakes costs the Longhorns dearly. I’d still rather take my chances with that version than spend three quarters trying to steer him toward the perfect performance. Choosing to unleash a quarterback this talented should be easier than deciding whether to eat dessert before dinner. The answer is always yes.

Ohio State is going to have a much less enjoyable time revisiting the fourth quarter because there were so many moments where the Buckeyes could’ve ended this thing. Julian Sayin missed what would’ve been a touchdown to McCuin. Texas somehow converted a fourth-and-9 during the comeback, and Ohio State later missed a field goal that would’ve put the Buckeyes up two scores again. Change any one of those moments and we’re probably spending Monday talking about an impressive road win instead of Ryan Day overseeing a collapse.

I don’t think this can be filed away solely as Texas producing a great comeback. It absolutely was one, and the Longhorns deserve credit for refusing to die when the game appeared finished, but Ohio State also let them keep hanging around long enough for something ridiculous to happen. Eventually you have to close the door. The Buckeyes never did, and Manning kicked it off the hinges once he realized it was still open.

We have to start in Manchester, where City beat United 1-0 in a derby that somehow turned into yet another referendum on VAR. Phil Foden was sent off early, United spent most of the afternoon playing against 10 men and Erling Haaland eventually scored the winner — except the goal probably never should have counted. We dive into the offside controversy, the postgame admission that VAR got it wrong and why Manchester United still doesn’t get to use any of that as an excuse for how poorly it played.

Then it’s time to visit North London, where life could hardly be more different. Arsenal survived a difficult trip to Sunderland to remain perfect, while Tottenham has now gone four Premier League matches without scoring a single goal. That has inspired a new Football Corner challenge: one mile run for every Tottenham Premier League goal this season. So far, cardiovascular fitness remains completely unchanged.

We’ll rapid-fire through the rest of the Premier League weekend before heading to Europe for Champions League Matchweek 1, including Real Madrid-Inter, Arsenal’s win in Naples and the wonderful absurdity of Como winning its first Champions League match 4-1 on the banks of Lake Como.

00:00 Welcome to The Matchbook!

01:42 Manchester City’s Controversial Win Over United

14:37 Arsenal’s Dominance and Invincibility

21:00 Tottenham’s Goal Drought Continues

24:43 Premier League Matchweek 4 Rapid Fire

32:26 The Champions League Matchday 1 Rapid Fire

Every football season deserves to be remembered.

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#PremierLeague #ManchesterUnited #ManchesterCity #Arsenal #Tottenham #ChampionsLeague #VAR #Soccer

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Welcome back to the Corner Poll, where the rankings are made up and the criteria remain intentionally vague.

If you’re new here, the idea is pretty simple. The Corner Poll ranks teams based on how I feel about them right now. Emphasis on the right now. Results obviously influence that, but this isn’t supposed to determine who would win on a neutral field. Expectations can change how I view a team just as easily as what happened on Saturday or Sunday, and sometimes the general feeling surrounding a team is enough to move it around.

In short, there isn’t a formula. That’s very intentional.

We’ve entered the point of the seasons where the rankings are beginning to have some actual evidence behind them. College football has already given us several reasons to completely rethink what we believed in August. The NFL finally played games that count, which was a welcome change of pace. Over in England, five Premier League Matchweeks have produced more interesting results than we all could’ve imagined.

We’re also keeping things a little simpler here. The point of the Corner Poll was never to produce a 4,000-word legal defense of why Iowa is ranked ahead of Mississippi State. I’ll explain the moves that deserve some attention and let the tiers do more of the work everywhere else.

Let’s rank some football teams.

Read more

This is a free excerpt from The Football Notebook. To read the full article, click the link below.

There is always some level of Cowboys hype before the season, even when everybody involved knows deep down that the team probably isn’t going anywhere. The national media contributes its usual share, while the local ecosystem eventually produces some variation of the idea that this is finally the year everything changes. Most of the time I can recognize what’s happening and proceed with the appropriate level of skepticism. This offseason was different.

I believed it.

There was almost no drama surrounding the Cowboys, which itself felt like a minor miracle after spending decades with Jerry Jones operating the franchise like a reality television producer. Brian Schottenheimer’s offense had been genuinely good in his first season, and Christian Parker seemed like an inspired choice to repair a defense that had been a complete disaster in 2025. He came from Philadelphia and had worked under Vic Fangio. Surely if the defense could improve even a little, Dallas would have something.

That was the theory, anyway.

Then the Cowboys went to MetLife Stadium and allowed the Giants to grind them into a fine powder.

New York converted nine of its 11 third downs and finished with 394 yards, with 165 coming on the ground. The Giants possessed the football for more than 36 minutes, and the second half became especially painful because Dallas’ offense barely got to participate in the game. The Cowboys had two possessions after halftime. They scored on both of them and still lost 28-20 because their defense apparently had somewhere else to be.

Parker looked over his skis, which isn’t a declaration that he’s incapable of becoming a good defensive coordinator. He’s young and this was his first regular season game running the show, so there are going to be days where the learning curve becomes obvious. I just didn’t expect the first lesson to involve the Giants converting third downs with the reliability of Steph Curry at the free throw line.

The frustrating part is that this was exactly what Dallas supposedly fixed. Caleb Downs was supposed to help transform the secondary, Von Miller was brought in and Parker’s arrival gave everyone reason to believe that last year’s defensive catastrophe wasn’t going to repeat itself. One game doesn’t erase any of that, but it certainly wasn’t the opening argument I wanted to hear.

I’m not writing off the Cowboys after Week 1 because doing that with any NFL team is a pretty good way to make yourself look stupid by October. Weird things happen during the opening weekend, and plenty of eventual contenders have started seasons looking considerably worse than Dallas did Sunday night. But the entire reason I allowed myself to buy into this team was the belief that the defense would no longer require Dak Prescott and the offense to be nearly perfect.

Football is back! Some things never change.

Elsewhere, Bills-Texans gave us perhaps the best game of the entire day. Josh Allen and C.J. Stroud traded blows in a game between two teams with legitimate AFC aspirations, Buffalo survived a near-disastrous Allen throw late and Joe Brady picked up his first win as an NFL head coach. Houston didn’t exactly leave looking bad, either, although two Stroud fumbles — including one on the Texans’ final possession — ultimately helped decide the afternoon.

And then there was whatever happened in Minnesota. Green Bay led 22-10 midway through the third quarter before Carson Wentz — yes, Carson Wentz in the year 2026 — helped the Vikings rip off 29 unanswered points and somehow win 39-22 after Kyler Murray left with a concussion. We also get into Chicago scoring an entirely reasonable 59 points, the Saints nearly completing a huge comeback against Detroit and Cincinnati actually beginning a season without immediately digging itself into a hole.

Plus, Deshaun Watson and the Browns are already a disaster, the Jets looked surprisingly competent, Arizona produced the first completely inexplicable result of the season against the Chargers, Pittsburgh and Atlanta subjected innocent viewers to three hours of football and the Raiders might actually have something functional cooking under Clint Kubiak. Baltimore also made sure we didn’t finish the episode without remembering that Derrick Henry is apparently never going to age. Every Sunday game gets its turn as we try to figure out what actually matters from Week 1 — and what we’ll all look stupid for believing a week from now.

00:00 Introduction to NFL Week 1 Recap

03:22 Cowboys at Giants Reaction

13:03 Bills at Texans Reaction

19:54 Commanders at Eagles Reaction

26:48 Packers at Vikings Reaction

33:50 Bears at Panthers Reaction

38:10 Saints at Lions Reaction

43:34 Buccaneers at Bengals Reaction

48:16 Browns at Jaguars Reaction

54:01 Jets at Titans Reaction

57:27 Cardinals at Chargers Reaction

01:00:28 Falcons at Steelers Reaction

01:03:10 Dolphins at Raiders Reaction

01:06:12 Ravens at Colts Reaction

01:09:19 Outro and Schedule Announcement

Every football season deserves to be remembered.

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Music: “Groovin” by Tritobefunny via Pixabay
Licensed under the Pixabay Content License