Mike Macdonald has not lost his touch or his mastery over the Patriots, kicking off this NFL season exactly how he finished the last one: with a statement win over New England. The Super Bowl-champion Seattle Seahawks reminded the league that they’re the team to beat by taking down the Patriots in the 2026 NFL opener.
But the Seahawks were hardly the only team to announce themselves as contenders. The 49ers manhandled the Rams in Australia on Thursday. The Bears swallowed the Panthers whole. And the Minnesota Vikings somehow erased a 12-point third-quarter deficit and took down the Green Bay Packers despite losing new quarterback Kyler Murray after just 10 offensive snaps.
That’s what was obvious this week. Now let’s go below the surface. This is Sound Smart, where I try to spin forward, dive deeper, think outside the box and read between the lines. If I do my job, you’ll be fluent in the NFL’s Week 1 action.
1.
Jalen Hurts and Tom Brady got to talking about how to play quarterback. How to make the position easy. Or, at least, how to avoid making the position more difficult than it needs to be.
Here’s what they talked about during the production meeting for the FOX broadcast leading into the Philadelphia Eagles’ 24-22 win over the Washington Commanders in Week 1.
“When you’re playing the position, a lot of it is about making sure you’re in the right play,” Hurts told reporters after the game. “When you’re doing the right thing, that takes no talent. So are we in the best run? Are we protecting ourselves in protection? Is everybody aligned? Doing those little things first — I think that’s most important. It’s more of an operation and being able to set the table and manage the things that you’re tasked with managing as a quarterback.”
Eagles’ Jalen Hurts discusses his conversation with Tom Brady during production meeting before Week 1
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After that? Everything should come naturally: first downs, touchdowns, wins.
I’d argue that in 2024 and 2022, Hurts made it look too easy. It looked so effortless for him to play the position that everyone chalked up his success to running back Saquon Barkley, receivers A.J. Brown and DeVonta Smith, tight end Dallas Goedert and coach Nick Sirianni. Hurts still doesn’t get credit for his role. He’ll never ask for it.
But for the past 12 months, Hurts has not made the position look easy. Even this week, I don’t think anyone would say Hurts made it look easy, not even with 203 passing yards, three passing touchdowns and 46 rushing yards. The criticism surrounding Hurts has led even me, an aficionado of the QB’s unorthodox playing style, to wonder if the Eagles might part ways with him if things get ugly this year.
Jalen Hurts celebrates after the Eagles’ 24-22 win over the Commanders at Lincoln Financial Field on Sunday. (Photo by Emilee Chinn/Getty Images)
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But let’s hold off that conversation. Because on Sunday, Hurts got back on track. It wasn’t perfect. It wasn’t always fun to watch. But the result was a Week 1 win.
Hurts delivered the fourth-quarter touchdown that helped the Eagles stave off a comeback by the Commanders. The Eagles QB delivered a clock-eating drive in the fourth quarter, where he hit on a 22-yard carry and, later, a 43-yard touchdown pass to Dallas Goedert.
Sirianni was quick to praise Hurts’ clutch scramble after the game.
“You don’t care how you get explosive plays,” Sirianni said.
Just that you get them.
It would be hyperbole to say that Hurts took over the game. It would even be hyperbole to say Hurts was dominant. But the beauty of what we saw on Sunday was that the Eagles let Hurts play football how he wanted.
Yes, that’s an indirect reference to former Eagles receiver A.J. Brown and former Eagles offensive coordinator Kevin Patullo. I don’t think Hurts loved working with either guy last year, with Brown applying pressure about what the offensive identity should be — and Patullo largely seeming like a bad fit for the gig, which applies its own kind of negative pressure.
It appears new offensive coordinator Sean Mannion is giving Hurts the freedom he needs — and frankly deserves. Hurts is running an offense that sets up him to succeed — and play the game how he likes. He’s good at winning — historically good.
Against the Commanders, Hurts overcame some difficulties from guard Landon Dickerson, who allowed a team-high five pressures, per Next Gen Stats. Hurts set up Saquon Barkley for an efficient game, with the running back ganing 83 yards on 15 carries. And Hurts made good use of newcomer Dontayvion Wicks, who hit on a 64-yard reception and a nine-yard touchdown.
The Eagles barely made use of first-round receiver Makai Lemon, who spent most of training camp recovering from a hamstring injury. DeVonta Smith was fairly quiet. Barkley wasn’t as explosive as he should have been, in part because this offensive line is still getting used to the new run scheme. In other words, there’s room to grow.
But Hurts and the offense looked solid — not structurally infirm, like the offenses of years past. And it looked like it had the potential for healthy, linear progress. Again, unlike the erratic offenses of years past.
You’d never hear or see Hurts get energized during his press conferences. So this quote is about as close as it gets.
“I think collectively, we’ve got a lot to build on — and obviously a lot to correct,” Hurts said. “I’m excited to get back into the process of becoming the team that we’re supposed to become.”
And that is, of course, not just a Super Bowl contender, but a Super Bowl winner.
2.
Ben Johnson has many goals. The question isn’t whether they’re ambitious. It’s whether they’re delusional.
And it was easy to feel a sense of skepticism around the Chicago Bears entering 2026. They seemed to be getting a tremendous amount of hype for a team with an enormously difficult schedule. But in Week 1, the Bears sent the message that they will not regress. They will not back down. They will not turn into a one-year wonder.
They blew out the Panthers 59-37. It was — more or less — what the second-year Bears coach told us his team would do.
“You’ve got 31 other teams coming to training camp saying, ‘Our goal is to win the Super Bowl.’ I want more than that,” Johnson told The Athletic during training camp. “I want to have the highest-scoring offense ever, which happens to be the 2013 Denver Broncos. I know how many points per game they scored [37.9], and I want to surpass them.”
The offense’s 59 points on Sunday were the second most in franchise history in the Super Bowl era, per FOX Sports research. Chicago also recorded six rushing touchdowns in a game for the first time since 1941.
During the offseason, Johnson told me that he wanted quarterback Caleb Williams, who completed just 58.1% of his passes last year, to top 65% this season. He’s at 72% through one week.
What’s even more impressive is that Williams threw for 269 yards and the Bears scored 59 points without the QB throwing a touchdown to receivers Luther Burden and Rome Odunze — or tight end Colston Loveland.
“I don’t think I called a really good game there in that first half,” Johnson said at the postgame podium.
This was another promise — with Johnson emphasizing that he’d seek explosives in the rushing game, rather than doing what most teams do, using the run game to stay on schedule and move the chains. Johnson wants the end zone. He wants points. He wants a Super Bowl.
“Obviously, this is going to be our worst game,” Williams said in a postgame press conference. “I know the points don’t necessarily show that.”
Worst game? What a humblebrag.
Look out, NFL. Here come the Bears.
3.
This game was going to be hard enough to win. Drake Maye didn’t need to make it any harder.
But he found a way to make things worse.
In some ways, the New England Patriots quarterback was set up to fail on Wednesday night against the Seattle Seahawks. Opening the season against the team that beat him handily in the Super Bowl is tough because Maye undoubtedly felt the complicated emotions of a Super Bowl rematch, but he also faced one of the NFL’s most confusing and deceptive defenses.
To top it off, Maye and the Patriots had to travel across the country and then lost star wide receiver A.J. Brown to a high ankle sprain in the first half.
Maye made everything worse with interception after interception … after interception. He had picks on back-to-back-to-back drives to end the game. All in the fourth quarter.
Eventually, Maye clinched a Seahawks win with his final turnover, a bad interception in the end zone with 26 seconds remaining. The Patriots were down three and in field goal position. He’d squandered a shot to win.
“You just have to throw it away and say, ‘We can’t win it on this throw.’ Drake will learn from it, we will all learn from it, and hopefully we will be better for it in the end,” coach Mike Vrabel said in the wake of the game.
With the whole offseason to ruminate over the film from the Super Bowl, you’d think Maye would’ve have a few more answers for what Macdonald threw at him. Even more important, you’d think that Maye would have kept his cool when Macdonald didn’t throw anything at him. In the case of Maye’s three interceptions, he had clear keys and reads. He forced the ball into coverages he shouldn’t have.
Most egregious, he did it at moments in the game that didn’t call for him to make a huge play. His situational awareness was appalling.
Afterward, he offered an honest and on-point assessment of how he played.
“I thought we had the game under control. I thought we had a good plan to try to start chipping away and just be patient. And yeah, lost patience. And it cost us,” Maye told reporters after the game in Seattle. “It’s unacceptable.”
This isn’t doomsday for Maye. But it perpetuated the idea that his MVP runner-up play last season was simply a product of the Patriots’ easy schedule.
I think he’ll be OK. He’s a good player, whose situational awareness and processing speed (in reading defenses) have been trending upward. But this was a stinker, comparable to what he did in the Super Bowl.
So, why didn’t he learn from the Super Bowl?
He had all offseason to do so. Now we’re left to wonder: When will he learn?
4.
Tom Brady pulled out a piece of NFL history during the Eagles’ win over the Commanders. It was the call sheet that Brady and Patriots offensive coordinator Josh McDaniels referred to as a “Picasso.”
It was the call sheet that won Super Bowl LI for the Patriots, coming back from a 28-3 deficit against the Atlanta Falcons. Brady showed the call sheet on the broadcast and broke down how the Patriots organized their plays for that particular game.
“You see third down. You see red area. Everything is very specific to the situation that we’re in. You’re not just looking down at 120 calls. You’re actually looking at a very segmented set of plays,” Brady said on the FOX broadcast.
So how did they pick which play appears at the top of each situation?
“If it’s the first one of the game, that’s the first one he’s going to call, because that’s what the quarterback wants,” Brady said. “Interesting thing is, all these reasons that these [plays] get put in the boxes is there’s a lot of tendencies going in [to the Super Bowl]. The problem with September football is they’re not showing any of these tendencies.”
It’s one thing to peel back the curtain on playcalling. It’s another thing to see the sheet that sprung the biggest comeback in Super Bowl history.
5.
Per Next Gen Stats, the 49ers offense featured motion at the snap on 65.6% of plays against the Rams, their highest rate in a game in the Kyle Shanahan era (since 2017).
There were a lot of reasons to send fullback Kyle Juszczyk in pre-snap motion during this game. And one of them was fairly simple (as Juszczyk alluded to in a tweet about his elite cardio): The 49ers looked like they had fresh legs after a week in Australia. The Rams, fresh off the plane, looked like they did not. They looked stiff and disoriented from the first snap to the last.
But there were clear schematic advantages for San Francisco, too.
It wasn’t long ago that the Miami Dolphins popularized the “cheat motion,” where former coach Mike McDaniel would send receivers Tyreek Hill and Jaylen Waddle in motion — and upfield — to give them an advantage to beat coverage, particularly press coverage. The NFL tweaked its rulebook and began to officiate it harder in an attempt to tighten that down.
Well, we’re seeing something similar but different in the 49ers’ offense. Their motions with Juszczyk sometimes sent him flying upfield and hurtling toward the Rams’ defense, giving him a running start to lead the way for running backs Christian McCaffrey and Kaelon Black. The movement also created new gap assignments for the opposing defender, forcing increased communication for L.A. It wreaked havoc on the Rams.
So, yes, this is for real.
And the new wrinkle was so effective that, if the NFL doesn’t start flagging it, it will be implemented into playbooks league-wide.
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