NFL Week 1 is just the start of a long season where a ton of things can change but let’s overreact to what happened anyway.
While there are two Monday Night Football games left to complete the first week of the 2019 season, NFL Week 1 is almost entirely in the books. Some things played out exactly as we expected them to while others went in the complete opposite direction. That’s the way that things work in this league when the games aren’t played on paper.
Because fans and analysts have been starved for meaningful football for quite some time, NFL Week 1 is the time of year where everything is blown out of proportion. Despite the fact that every team has 15 games remaining and so much can still transpire, what happened in the season-opener is taken as the gospel.
Time and again this has proven to be foolish. Just last season, the Indianapolis Colts looked like a bottom-feeder with a 1-5 record through six games. Come Week 17, the Colts were an AFC Wild Card team that actually won a playoff game. In the simplest of terms, NFL Week 1 is just a drop in the bucket of a long season.
As such, we shouldn’t overreact to what happened in the first week of the 2019 season. We shouldn’t bury the Cleveland Browns, shouldn’t crown a number of teams, shouldn’t write the obituaries for players like Jameis Winston, Eli Manning and so on. It’s just downright reckless to do after one game.
Yet, where’s the fun in not being reckless every once in a while?
Rather than avoiding overreactions, we’re going to steer into it and completely lose our minds over what happened in the first week of the 2019 NFL season. With that, let’s get into these 10 overreactions that will undoubtedly look ridiculous in a few weeks time — unless they don’t.