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NFL Week 1: Surprise wins, losses and players: Lessons from Sunday

  • Bill Barnwell, editor at ESPNSeptember 9, 2024, 8:55 a.m. ET

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      Bill Barnwell is a senior NFL writer for ESPN.com. He analyzes football on and off the field like no one else in the world, writing about in-season dos and don'ts, off-season transactions and more.

      He is the host of the weekly podcast “Bill Barnwell Show.” Barnwell joined ESPN in 2011 as a staff writer at Grantland. Follow him on Twitter here: @billbarnwell.

Week 1 usually holds a few surprises, but this week the shocks came before the games even started. At 1 p.m. ET on Sunday afternoon, Dolphins wide receiver Tyreek Hill was briefly detained by police en route to the game in Miami, and we later learned that his teammate Calais Campbell had also been handcuffed. The summer's contract saga ended when quarterback Dak Prescott signed a four-year, $240 million deal to stay with the Cowboys. We even learned that Kendrick Lamar would be doing the halftime show at Super Bowl LIX in New Orleans in February. That was a full day before we even got to see a single snap of the football.

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I then spent most of the day noting things about Week 1 that were either very surprising or completely not surprising, and since I want to cover as many games and stories as possible from the first Sunday of football, that seemed like a good approach for this recap.

Ten of Sunday afternoon's twelve games appear in one section or another, although one could easily have added a dozen more interesting things that stand out. Let's get to the main storylines of the first week:

Jump to a section:
New England's surprise | Watson's terrible day
Darnold's winning streak | Prescott's new contract
Rookie QBs disappointed | Houston's debuts
Chicago's comeback | Pittsburgh's ugly win
Richardson's day with ups and downs | Two safeties?!
Carolina's landslide victory | A mysterious punt

Surprising: The Patriots beat the Bengals in Cincinnati

There was no shortage of people willing to write off the Patriots in 2024, a list that apparently included the Patriots themselves. They traded edge rusher Matthew Judon to Atlanta before the season, and after top-five pick Drake Maye played better than veteran quarterback Jacoby Brissett in the preseason, the organization opted to keep Brissett in the starting lineup, reportedly out of concern that the rookie could get injured behind a leaky offensive line.

Brissett took a few hits and got up from the floor with a scrunched up face at times, but the win makes those hits seem a lot better on the flight home. The veteran threw for 121 yards on 24 pass attempts, but he played his role perfectly in a surprise 16-10 win over the Bengals.

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