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.

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.

There is no more dangerous time in the life of a Dallas Cowboys fan than the beginning of a new season.

Everything is possible. Hope is anew. The dreams that have so often been crushed have somehow been revived in the offseason. The national media has spent the last eight months hyping up the entire operation, declaring that this is finally the year where the Dallas Cowboys do it again! The ‘90s are now! Tom Landry has returned! What is old is new again!

Yeah, we’ve all heard that same song and dance over and over again.

Yet here we are, standing at the beginning of another Cowboys season an staring directly at the bait once again. Maybe that’s the beauty of sports fandom, or maybe Dallas has simply spent the last three decades conducting the world’s longest experiment to determine exactly how many times one fan base can convince itself that everything will be different. What’s the definition of insanity again?

Either way, 2026 has arrived, and the slate is clean. The Cowboys once again have an entire season ahead of them to either make good on all that hope or find a brand new and increasingly creative way to crush it.

So, what are we supposed to make of the 2026 Cowboys?

For that, The Football Corner enlisted the help of Brett Bender, a friend of the site, Cowboys aficionado and someone who probably knows more about this team than Jerry Jones does. Brett watches the Cowboys with the sort of attention normally reserved for FBI surveillance operations, which makes him the perfect person to explain whether Dallas is actually different this time or whether we’re all about to fall for the oldest trick in the NFL book.

Seth: Let’s start as broadly as possible: What are we supposed to make of the Dallas Cowboys entering 2026?

Brett: The phrase “moving different” has been floated around plenty of news cycles for this season already. While we hear some version of that every year, I think there is plenty of evidence that the Cowboys have done things differently without sounding too much like a homer.

In 2025, the Cowboys had one of the better offenses in the NFL while carrying a historically bad defense. This offseason, they threw out their normal blueprint and made changes in ways fans haven’t been accustomed to.

Specifically, the defensive coordinator interview process felt different. In recent years, the Cowboys have interviewed only a few candidates before ultimately turning to familiar faces like Mike Zimmer and Matt Eberflus. This time, Dallas cast a much wider net, interviewing nine candidates before hiring Christian Parker, a first-time defensive coordinator who also became the youngest coordinator in franchise history.

Seth: I’ve spent most of the offseason arguing that Dak Prescott is absolutely good enough to win with. As someone who watches every snap of this team with the same amount of diligence that Mike McCarthy studies a Cheesecake Factory menu, are you still a Dak believer?

Brett: My long answer would require chapters, but my short answer is simple: Absolutely.

I could spend this entire answer selling you on the highly productive numbers Dak routinely finishes seasons with, but my biggest reason for still believing in him is much simpler: Finding a good quarterback in the NFL is really hard to do. Teams throw away season after season searching for a quarterback who can even sniff the top 10 at the position. Dallas has one.

Dak has his flaws, and the lack of postseason success is always going to be attached to him until he changes it, but I think we sometimes lose perspective on just how difficult it is to find a quarterback capable of consistently playing at his level.

I think Dak deserves to be talked about more in MVP races; he really should have won it in 2023. I think the No. 1 thing that hurts Dak Prescott is that he has to wear a star on his helmet. Being the quarterback of the Dallas Cowboys makes you one of the most criticized athletes in sports.

Dak is now in his 11th season, and one guy I keep comparing his career to is Matthew Stafford. Now, Stafford is celebrated because he’s a Super Bowl winner and a league MVP; he’s doing all of the great things. Before Stafford was traded, who was he? He didn’t win in Detroit. In his first 10 years, he was a one-time Pro Bowler with an 0-3 playoff record. I’m not attacking Stafford here. I am happy with how his career turned around late, but Stafford was allowed to spend most of those years in Detroit without facing anything close to the level of national scrutiny Dak has faced in Dallas.

Dak’s story doesn’t have to be finished, either. Dak is on the back half of his career, but there is still an opportunity to change the national narrative about him. 4,500 yards and 30 touchdowns show that he still has the arm talent to produce. For me, the faith in Dak Prescott never left, and I believe he can absolutely win in Dallas.

Seth: The offense was legitimately good for stretches last season, but the defense was an absolute disaster. How much faith do you have in Christian Parker fixing this thing, and what specifically has to change for the Cowboys to become a contender?

Brett: Dallas allowed over 500 points, 30 per game, and 51.4% of offenses led a successful scoring drive against them. Surely, the defense can’t get any worse?

I think all we can do is have faith, but luckily, Parker has given us plenty of reasons to believe in his message. I’ll start with the defensive staff he hired. They went with a similar strategy they used in 2025 when it came to building the offensive staff. Schottenheimer did not add a bunch of old friends around the league. He instead hired some guys out of college, some with NFL experience, young and old. This yielded great results for the offense from 2024 to 2025, and implementing that now on the defensive side could perhaps produce a similar result.

As for Parker himself, I’m really intrigued by what this defense can look like. He comes from the Vic Fangio coaching tree, and the Cowboys are going from the relatively straightforward base 4-3 defense we saw last season to something a little more complex. Parker said in his opening press conference that the defense will be 3-4 by nature, but we’re going to see multiple fronts, coverages and personnel groupings that are designed to make things much less predictable for opposing offenses.

Obviously, adding complexity only works if you have the personnel capable of handling it, and that might be the biggest reason I’m optimistic. It starts up front with Quinnen Williams, who is the centerpiece of this defense, and they’ve added players around him like Rashan Gary. Jalen Thompson gives them a veteran safety who can play deep, come down into the box or cover in the slot, and then they drafted Caleb Downs, whose versatility and football IQ could make him the perfect guy to run this defense on the field.

The best part for Christian Parker is that, supported by a strong offense, this defensive group does not have to be the 2015 Denver Broncos. They just need to be good enough to be a top-18 defense in the NFL. The offense makes this team a Super Bowl contender; the defense just needs to give them a break here and there.

Seth: Which player — outside of Dak, CeeDee or Pickens — do you think could completely change the ceiling of this team in 2026?

Brett: Can I cheat and say the defensive line? If I have to pick one guy, though, it’s the captain of that group, Quinnen Williams.

I think we’re going to see a lot of creativity from this Cowboys defense. Christian Parker specializes in the secondary, and I think he has some incredible ideas for disguising coverages, moving players around and making things difficult for opposing quarterbacks. But none of that matters if the Cowboys can’t stop the run or generate pressure up front. None of it.

That’s why Quinnen can completely change the ceiling of this team. The Cowboys need the defensive line to be physical and allow Parker to actually get to all of the creative things he wants to do on the back end. If teams can consistently run the ball on Dallas, Parker isn’t going to have the freedom to play with personnel and coverages. If quarterbacks can sit comfortably in the pocket or kill them with quick routes, disguising what’s happening in the secondary only gets you so far.

Quinnen Williams is the foundation of the defensive house. If he can command double-teams, disrupt the run and create pressure from the interior, it makes life easier for Rashan Gary and Donovan Ezeiruaku to work the edge, which cleans up the front for the linebackers and ultimately makes coverage easier for the defense.

Seth: The NFC East has the Eagles coming off a strange season, Washington trying to get back to where it was in Jayden Daniels’ rookie year and the Giants beginning the John Harbaugh era. Where does Dallas actually fit in this division?

Brett: The most fun division in the NFL, if you like chaos.

I remember the years when a team would fall backward and win the division with seven wins, and years when 12 wins might only get you a wild-card spot. The teams in the NFC East have all taken turns being the best and worst teams in the division, all within the last seven years. Without getting too far into the weeds of each team, I think Dallas can win the division just as easily as it could finish third.

Philadelphia had some weird things going on, sure. They had weird things going on in 2023, when they lost the division lead to Dallas in the final weeks of the season, but they still managed to get back into the Super Bowl picture. I don’t think their time as the division favorite is up yet.

Washington probably has the toughest uphill battle to work through and, honestly, probably has the highest odds of finishing last in the East. As for New York, that is the wild card. These are definitely not the Giants of years past; there are things to be excited about. But, for me, I need to see the proof of concept to believe anything about the Giants. I guess we’ll find out Sunday soon enough.

Seth: Give me the scenario where this season goes completely off the rails. What has to happen for us to be sitting here in December talking about another seven-win Cowboys season — or something even worse?

Brett: What a question to deflate the mood.

The easy answer is injuries, particularly to Dak Prescott, but that’s boring. If we’re talking about a truly disastrous season where the Cowboys somehow finish worse than they did a year ago, I think it requires more than Christian Parker’s defense struggling to put everything together. It probably means the offense goes from being one of the best in football to taking a massive step backward.

And while I loved a lot of what Brian Schottenheimer did offensively in 2025, I don’t think that side of the ball was without its concerns. His red-zone play-calling, particularly inside the 10-yard line, left me wanting more at times, and there were several end-of-half time-management situations that I didn’t love. Those are areas where Schottenheimer has to improve in Year 2.

My bigger concern, though, would be Dallas becoming complacent with what worked last season. One of the things I loved about the 2025 offense was its creativity and how they used their weapons with Lamb and Pickens. But you have to anticipate teams learning your tendencies now.

Seth: Now give me the opposite: What would have to happen for Dallas to legitimately contend? And how far do the Cowboys need to go for you to consider 2026 a successful season?

Brett: I think Dallas has to put together the pieces for this team to contend. I believe with a top-five offense, your defense only needs to be, what, 15th?

It’s hard to really rank it; the rest of the NFC is going to change this season as well. What I will say is the expectations will be high, but that’s because you are the Dallas Cowboys. This team needs to get to an NFC Championship Game, at minimum. That’s how Cowboys fans feel.

Now, in a fair society, it’s extremely unfair to expect that from a second-year head coach who just missed the playoffs last year and a first-year defensive coordinator. A realistic goal should be to improve, which means making the postseason. I dislike making everyone carry around the “30-year drought,” but it’s the reality with this team. Schottenheimer is not responsible for the 30 years, but I will say there’s pressure on Dak because he’s been here for 10.

Is making the postseason good enough? Is getting a wild-card win good enough? We’ve accepted it a few times in the past but then never taken the next step. Maybe that’s why the NFC title game needs to be the goal.

Seth: Who has more riding on the 2026 season: Dak Prescott, Brian Schottenheimer or Jerry Jones?

Brett: This is a fun question because I’ve seen this debate floating around a lot this offseason. Pressure can be hard to define, so I look at it this way: Fast-forward to September 2027. I doubt Jerry Jones is getting fired as general manager, and I fully expect Dak Prescott to still be the quarterback of the Dallas Cowboys. Can I say the same thing with complete confidence about Brian Schottenheimer? Probably not.

Unfortunately, in Dallas, the head coach has always been the easiest scapegoat. Plenty will be said about Dak if this season goes poorly, and there will be another round of criticism directed at Jerry. But at the end of the day, the head coach is the one who winds up getting fired. That’s why I think Schottenheimer has the most riding on 2026.

And I say that as someone who really likes what Schottenheimer has done since taking over. Having had the opportunity to meet Brian and his family, I can tell you the person you see publicly is genuine. He believes wholeheartedly in the culture he’s trying to build. “Compete Every Day” isn’t just something printed on a wall at The Star. He sells it to his players, he talks about it publicly and I think you saw pieces of that culture begin to take shape during his first season with the fun postgame videos and offseason segments.

When Schottenheimer was hired, one of the biggest questions I had was whether you could actually win with culture. I wrote an entire piece about it because we’ve seen coaches like Dan Campbell help transform organizations by establishing an identity players genuinely buy into. But there’s a shelf life on selling culture without results.

If Schottenheimer goes through two seasons with losing records and no playoff appearances, the conversation changes quickly. The media stops talking about the refreshing culture and starts asking whether the nice guy can actually win football games. More importantly, eventually it becomes harder to ask players to keep buying into a message when there aren’t wins validating it.

Seth: Finally, give me one Cowboys prediction you believe right now that you might be completely embarrassed to have read back to you in January.

Brett: Surely this won’t come back to haunt me.

Dak Prescott will finally get his flowers and win the league’s MVP. He has done everything in his power to will this Cowboys team to successful results. Unfortunately, wins are a QB stat, so the defense will have to improve to get Dallas back to a winning record.

But with an improved defense and a second consecutive top-performing offense, Dak Prescott, at age 33, is the NFL’s Most Valuable Player.

The day has finally arrived.

After months and months of sitting on our hands waiting for the NFL to return, the first action of the 2026 season takes the field tonight when the Seattle Seahawks begin their title defense against the New England Patriots in a rematch of last year’s Super Bowl. It’s such a glorious feeling to have this sport back in our lives, especially because a full NFL slate is arguably one of the greatest things since sliced bread. There are few things better than waking up on a Sunday morning knowing you have roughly 11 consecutive hours of football ahead of you, most of which you will spend convincing yourself to care deeply about games that have absolutely nothing to do with your favorite team. Fantasy football will do that to you.

Wait, I’m just now receiving word that the season is beginning on a Wednesday.

Yeah, that’s not cool.

Set aside my thoughts on the NFL’s continued encroachment on every single day of the week — pretty soon we’re going to have Tuesday Night Football on Tubi — and there is nothing like watching this league. While college football will always hold a special place in my heart for its wacky, silly vibe, the NFL provides us with something much cleaner. It’s just good old-fashioned American football at its finest, played by the best players in the world and with enough parity that just about every game can turn into an absolute classic.

Any given Sunday, after all.

There are favorites, obviously. The Seahawks are defending champions after Sam Darnold completed one of the strangest career arcs in recent NFL history, going from failed Jets quarterback to reclamation project to legitimately good starter to Super Bowl champion. Now comes an equally interesting question: Can he do it again?

Of course, the Seahawks and Darnold might not even be the most interesting team in their own division. The Los Angeles Rams spent the offseason behaving like I do when I turn off the salary cap in Madden, adding Myles Garrett to a team that already had a glut of stars like Matthew Stafford and Puka Nacua, and that was before Aaron Donald apparently got bored with retirement and decided he wanted back in. This roster is, frankly, absurd, and everybody knows it.

Then there’s Buffalo, where we have once again reached the annual tradition of wondering whether it’s finally the Bills’ time to shine. Josh Allen is too good to spend his entire career in purgatory, but that’s increasingly the direction we’re headed unless the Bills can finally finish the job. At some point, someday has to become today, and Buffalo has reached the stage where another really good regular season followed by a handshake in January isn’t going to feel particularly satisfying.

There’s obviously so much more. Drake Maye just helped New England reach the Super Bowl, but a tumultuous offseason for the organization — paired with the fact that the Patriots were labeled “schedule merchants” — now leaves some doubt that the feat will be repeatable. Patrick Mahomes and the Kansas City Chiefs are coming off the kind of season that would certainly qualify as a crisis. The question now becomes whether it’s possible for the operation to bounce back or if this part of the Chiefs’ story has run its course. Caleb Williams and the Bears are fascinating — I have a love affair with Ben Johnson’s offense — the Broncos were a Bo Nix injury away from potentially reaching the Super Bowl last season, and Aaron Rodgers is still playing professional football because apparently Father Time has decided to stop answering his calls.

There will be others. There always are. That’s just the NFL. Starting tonight, we get all of it back.

For the next five months, Sundays are an event again. Really, the entire weekend is an event. There’s some sort of football on every day of the week. Depending on your view on life, that’s either the greatest thing in the world or a calamity that will end civilization.

Either way, I’m of the opinion that we’ve officially entered the best time of the year.

There has not been a single moment in my lifetime when the Las Vegas Raiders weren’t a complete mess.

And I’m being completely serious about that.

The Raiders lost Super Bowl XXXVII on Jan. 26, 2003. Two days later, I came into this world, and all I’ve known is complete dysfunction. I’m sure there have been moments of joy and wonder throughout the 23-plus years since the team fell to the Tampa Bay Buccaneers in the Super Bowl — Derek Carr was always a pleasant experience — but those have been few and far between.

Since moving to Las Vegas in 2020, the Raiders are 39-62. Only one playoff appearance has come about in Sin City, and the last several seasons have been absolute catastrophes. Even Pete Carroll couldn’t uplift this ailing franchise from the desert — literally.

Sports organizations that find themselves in the metaphorical wilderness sometimes have a tendency to wander for years, desperately searching for a way back to civilization. The Cleveland Browns are certainly a prime example of this. The New York Jets also apply, as do many other franchises across multiple levels of sport. The Raiders have seemingly inserted themselves into this category, though their tenure will be short-lived if one person has anything to say about it.

Enter Fernando Mendoza

Fernando Mendoza is a marvel.

No, not in the sense that he could suit up as a superhero, but in the sense that he defies every stereotypical convention of what an NFL quarterback is meant to be.

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But I’m not sure anything feels quite as hopeless as looking around your quarterback room and realizing the answer probably isn’t there.

That is the unfortunate reality facing a handful of teams as the 2026 season approaches, and perhaps the cruelest part is that many of them have nobody to blame but themselves. Years of bad draft picks, failed development, questionable contracts, ill-advised trades and veteran Band-Aids have left some of the NFL’s least inspiring operations in exactly the place you never want to be: desperately trying to convince themselves that maybe this quarterback situation isn’t as bad as everyone else thinks it is.

There is hope on the horizon, at least. The 2027 NFL Draft could feature an absurd collection of quarterbacks, with Arch Manning, Dante Moore, CJ Carr, LaNorris Sellers and Julian Sayin among the headliners before we even get to names like CJ Bailey, Trinidad Chambliss, Jayden Maiava, Darian Mensah and Drew Mestemaker. Who knows how many will actually declare or remain highly regarded by April, but the possibilities are tantalizing enough that fans of quarterback-starved teams might spend quite a few Saturdays dreaming about the future.

Because the present?

Oh, buddy.

New York Jets: We’ve Somehow Ended Up Back at Geno Smith

There comes a point when you just have to throw your hands into the air and ask, “What are we doing here?”

Geno Smith returning to the Jets as their starting quarterback more than a decade after the franchise drafted him almost feels too perfect. Smith famously revived his career after leaving New York, emerging as a legitimately good slinger of the pigskin in Seattle before things took a turn for the worse last season in Las Vegas. Now he’s back where everything started, playing for a franchise that has spent the intervening years providing increasingly compelling evidence that perhaps Geno Smith was never really the Jets’ biggest problem.

Just look at the journey. Sam Darnold was supposed to lift the franchise out of the abyss, only to eventually find considerably more success elsewhere. The Zach Wilson experience followed, and that was somehow even more depressing. Aaron Rodgers arrived amid Super Bowl aspirations before his tenure became memorable for almost everything except winning football games. Justin Fields got his opportunity. Mike White had his “Linsanity” moment, becoming the most important man in New York for approximately 15 minutes. And now, after all those years searching for an answer, the Jets have somehow circled all the way back to Geno.

Perhaps this works. Smith has played good football before, and I suppose there is a universe where he turns back the clock and drags this team to eight or nine wins. But when the rest of the room consists of Cade Klubnik, Brady Cook and Bailey Zappe, there isn’t exactly an obvious succession plan waiting behind him.

The Jets are going to Jet, and Geno Smith starting in 2026 is simply the latest chapter.

Cleveland Browns: How Many Quarterbacks Can One Franchise Possibly Try?

I don’t particularly want to touch Cleveland’s quarterback situation with a 10-foot pole, but somebody has to do it. Deshaun Watson and Shedeur Sanders are currently battling for the starting job, with Watson getting the first crack in Cleveland’s preseason opener before Sanders starts the following week. Watson appears to have the advantage for now, which means the Browns may once again turn to the quarterback at the center of one of the most disastrous trades in recent NFL history.

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I’m going to keep this short and sweet because we all have Turkey Trots, Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parades, and tons of other festivities to get to today, but bear with me as I write something that’s probably very foolish.

The Dallas Cowboys have me believing again.

I know. It’s probably stupid, and the veterans of this song-and-dance are probably rolling their eyes right now. You know who you are.

I’m serious, though. After watching the team come back from 21 down to beat the hated Philadelphia Eagles on Sunday afternoon, I started to get the warm-and-fuzzy feeling that I’ve sometimes felt throughout my decade-plus of watching the franchise crash and burn. And it all stems from the similarities between this campaign and another one that I hold near and dear to my heart.

It’s not 2016, when the team finished 13-3 thanks to the youthful energy of Dak Prescott and Ezekiel Elliott. That season ended in heartbreak thanks to Aaron Rodgers and the leg of Green Bay Packers kicker Mason Crosby. We don’t talk about that.

Then there was the run from 2021-23, when I remember having thoughts of “Could this be the year?” over and over again, only to be ruthlessly reminded that this is the Dallas Cowboys, and there probably won’t ever be a Super Bowl ever again.

Or will there be? Because let me tell you, I’m starting to believe that perhaps this season could be something special, all because it reminds me of 2018.

Let me bring you up to speed if you’re unfamiliar. In 2018, the Cowboys started the year 3-5. The vibes were bad heading into the team’s bye week. That’s when Jerry, Stephen, and all the other bigwigs in the Cowboys’ front office traded for a player that Dallas fans will never forget: Amari Cooper.

The Cooper transaction completely flipped the script on that entire season. Dallas went on to win seven of its last eight games, which was good enough to win the NFC East and return to the playoffs for the first time since 2016. There, they went on to win in the Wild Card round against the Seattle Seahawks before losing to the Los Angeles Rams in the Divisional round. I’ll always have fond memories of watching the Seahawks game with my dad in the living room of our condo in Israel at 3 o’clock in the morning. It was a brutal wake-up time, but it was so worth it to see Prescott flip his way to a victory over Russell Wilson and the Seahawks.

That season remains my favorite Cowboys campaign ever. From that playoff game versus Seattle to the Sunday Night Football victory over the Eagles in the middle of the year (a game I watched with a broken elbow), I’ll always cherish that team. The vibes were so good, and I miss them.

That brings me to 2025, when the Cowboys began this season in a miserable state. Micah Parsons was traded away before everything started, which put a damper on everything. Then the first several games were played, and it was clear that this defense was not going to be up to snuff with the rest of the NFL. As such, the Cowboys were pretty dreadful through the first half of the season, and their 3-5-1 record was indicative of that fact.

Then the bye week rolled around, and Jerry Jones decided to try to right this ship once and for all. He shipped off a couple of early-round picks for star defensive tackle Quinnen Williams in an attempt to make the worst run defense ever just a little bit better. Some other pieces — such as DeMarvion Overshown — came back from injury, too, which also helped that struggling unit.

Two weeks later, the Cowboys have reeled off two straight wins, one of which was over the hated Eagles in exhilarating fashion. And one of the key reasons the team ended up claiming victory was because of the additions to the defense — Williams being chief among them.

So, now with the Thanksgiving game against the Kansas City Chiefs on deck, the Cowboys have me believing once more. It’s probably a fool’s errand, and I’m prepared to get my heart broken again, but right now, I’m back on board. If Dallas somehow takes care of Kansas City this afternoon, it’ll be time to talk about who the Cowboys will be playing in the playoffs.

Maybe I’m getting ahead of myself, but I can’t help it. Because for a few fleeting moments, the ‘Boys might be back — at least in the eyes of this 22-year-old who remembers staying up late at 13, heart racing, wishing with everything he had for a Cowboys win. And maybe, just maybe, he can feel that magic again — the kind that makes you believe in more than a game, that makes you believe in hope itself.