Photo: Denny Medley/USA Today/Reuters
My initial pitch for this column was a 2024 NFL season preview that focused on whether various existential threats might cause near-term (or even long-term) damage to the league or whether it is simply indestructible. I have a long history of writing about that very question for this very magazine — here’s an illustrative example from 2017, though there are many others — and it’s where my mind always goes first with football. The NFL is the single most powerful force in American sports, maybe even in American popular culture. Any time something gets that big, well, it’s tough to blame a journalist for wondering when a reckoning will come. It is kind of our thing.
My editor, in a friendly, yep-here-goes-Will-again sort of way, responded essentially, C’mon, the league is indestructible. Stop pretending it isn’t.
As NFL television ratings continue to set new records every year and the league creeps ever closer to its once-mocked $25 billion revenue goal, I find it difficult to argue with that. The NFL swallows everything in its path and apparently always will. Who am I trying to kid here?
So let’s dispense with the pearl clutching and hubristic doomsaying and just talk about the games. With the season beginning on the Thursday night after Labor Day, with the two-time defending Super Bowl champion Chiefs hosting the Ravens, here are the biggest storylines you need to know heading in.
The 2023 NFL season might have felt a little less like a guy was blasting his leaf blower in your ear all day, to steal President Obama’s description of Donald Trump at the Democratic National Convention. That’s because the season featured only four plays involving Aaron Rodgers. The four-time MVP’s much, much hyped debut as a New York Jet ended in his first game when he tore his Achilles, dooming the Jets’ season and saving us all from having to hear ESPN spend half its programming arguing about Rodgers accusing Jimmy Kimmel of being friends with Jeffrey Epstein, or whatever weird shit Pat McAfee paid him to say that day. Rodgers, who will turn 41 in December and is the oldest player in the NFL, now says he has a new lease on his football life and claims to be “leaning less into the [non-football] stuff” (a claim that should be treated skeptically). He is surrounded by weapons on an improved Jets team that is built entirely around him. Rodgers is trying to follow the Tom Brady script, playing well into his 40s, though Brady won more Super Bowls after he turned 40 (two) than Rodgers has won in his entire career (one). He is also coming off an offseason in which he was plainly lobbying to be RFK Jr.’s running mate and was reported (by Jake Tapper!) to have claimed the Sandy Hook shooting was fake. Rodgers is back in the country’s largest media market, desperate to be relevant again, on the last leg of his career, during an election year. Great.
After a year off during which he did not once go on a psilocybin retreat, the future Hall of Famer will make his broadcasting debut this year as Fox’s lead analyst. He replaces the highly regarded Greg Olsen in a move so controversial even Travis Kelce questioned it. Fox is paying Tom Brady a shocking $375 million over ten years, and you don’t give a guy that much money to be a backup. And yet: No one really knows if Brady is any good at this. He was hardly known for strong statements during his playing career — though his locker sure was — and he didn’t even call Fox’s lone preseason game. This is an enormous gamble on a guy who is the greatest quarterback of all time but was hardly the most vivid, dynamic personality. (Though all told, that Netflix roast was considerably more entertaining than anyone had any right to think it would be.) His first game will be Cowboys vs. Browns in week one, and we’ll find out, you know, if he’s actually capable of announcing football games in an entertaining fashion. Or if he’s even allowed to say anything at all.
As someone who sort of presumed the Travis Kelce–Taylor Swift coupling had been cooked up by a publicist until the very second they were actually seen together, I’ll confess ultimately to be charmed by the whole thing. I dunno, I guess they just seem kinda nice. But if this is going to be an ongoing storyline in the 2024 season the way it was in 2023 — and you could make an argument it was the biggest storyline last season — it won’t be enough to have her just show up in the skyboxes with his mom and brother. Do we get a breakup story midseason? Rumors of a wedding? I say this all only slightly facetiously: The NFL embraced this relationship wholeheartedly in 2023 in a way it never had in the past (you would never have heard Jessica Simpson’s name come up during a Cowboys broadcast when Tony Romo was QB) and received palpable ratings boosts accordingly. How much do they steer into the story this year? These dramas, after all, ultimately need a pivot.
There was a time when rookie quarterbacks, including both Brady and Rodgers, were expected to sit on the bench during their first season or two to learn, to absorb, to marinate. There is now way too much money and front-office credibility invested in a first-round quarterback pick to let them ride the pine for too long; you’ve got to throw them into the fire immediately. A record six QBs were chosen in the first round of the draft back in April, and three of them — first overall pick Caleb Williams of the Bears, Heisman Trophy winner Jayden Daniels of the Commanders, and Bo Nix of the Broncos — will be starting week-one games, with the other three surely not long to follow. Rookie quarterbacks can turn out to be franchise saviors (the Texans’ C.J. Stroud) or franchise killers (potentially the Panthers’ Bryce Young), and we tend to find out quickly which is which. It’s hard to blame the ones who don’t pan out: I’m not sure I’d want to be a 21-year-old kid whose life’s work involves 11 massive humans hurling themselves at me from every direction either.
For the first time since 1999, the hooded wonder that is Bill Belichick will not be prowling the NFL sidelines as a head coach, instead joining the CW as a co-host of Inside the NFL and presumably learning from his girlfriend what skibidi means. Hating Belichick has been part of NFL fans’ lives for so long that his absence will feel like a phantom limb for a few months; the bile will rise in your throat every time you see the Patriots logo even without him there. Fortunately, Jim Harbaugh, who is somehow even weirder than Belichick, has returned to the NFL after winning a national championship with Michigan. He’s the new Chargers coach and will try to return to the Super Bowl for the first time since he faced his brother’s Ravens back in 2013. Harbaugh is exactly the sort of insane person who will both thrive and ultimately burn out in this NFL media environment: He may win a Super Bowl and set himself on fire at midfield in the same game. (Someone will have to put him out with milk.)
It’s actually sort of hard to explain what’s different here, but it’s supposed to make the games safer and more exciting. We’ll see about that, but you’ll definitely be confused when you watch your first game. Here’s what it looks like:
We’ve had a year to get used to all the new network configurations carrying all these games — your Amazon Prime, your Peacock, your Paramount+. Now we’ve got a new entrant: Netflix, which will be streaming two games on Christmas Day. For the first time in NFL history, there will be games on six nights of the week at some point this year, every one but Tuesday. The Friday-night game takes place on September 6 in Brazil, when the Eagles play the Packers. Oh yeah, there’s a football game in Brazil this year.
Even with all the great dynasties of NFL history — the Cowboys, the 49ers, the Steelers, the Patriots — no team has ever won three Super Bowls in a row. That’s what the Chiefs will try to pull off this year. They’re the current favorites to do it, something that would secure their place in history and provide further grist to the “Patrick Mahomes may end up better than Tom Brady” argument. It would be a mammoth moment in NFL history, one that would, of course, quickly be overshadowed when everybody glimpses Taylor Swift at the Super Bowl.
