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Bill Barnwell, ESPN Staff WriterSep 9, 2024, 08:55 AM ET
Close- Bill Barnwell is a senior NFL writer for ESPN.com. He analyzes football on and off the field like no one else on the planet, writing about in-season X’s and O’s, offseason transactions and so much more.
He is the host of the Bill Barnwell Show podcast, with episodes released once a week. Barnwell joined ESPN in 2011 as a staff writer at Grantland. Follow him on Twitter here: @billbarnwell.
Week 1 usually delivers a few surprises, but the shocks came before the games even started this week. By 1 p.m. ET Sunday afternoon, Dolphins wide receiver Tyreek Hill had been briefly detained by police on his way to the game in Miami, and we would later find out that teammate Calais Campbell had also been placed in handcuffs. The contractual saga of the summer ended, as quarterback Dak Prescott inked a four-year, $240 million deal to stay with the Cowboys. We even found out that Kendrick Lamar was going to perform the halftime show at Super Bowl LIX in New Orleans in February. That’s a full day before we even got to a single snap of football.
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I subsequently spent most of the day noticing things about Week 1 that were either very surprising or extremely unsurprising, and since I want to hit on as many games and stories as possible from the first Sunday of football, that seemed like a good way to approach this recap.
Ten of the 12 games from Sunday afternoon end up coming up in one section or another, although it would have been easy to add a dozen more interesting things that stood out. Let’s get into the biggest storylines from Week 1:
Jump to a section:
New England’s upset | Watson’s terrible day
Darnold’s hot streak | Prescott’s new deal
Rookie QBs underwhelmed | Houston’s debuts
Chicago’s comeback | Pittsburgh’s ugly win
Richardson’s up-and-down day | Two safeties?!
Carolina’s blowout | A head-scratching punt
Surprising: The Patriots upset the Bengals in Cincinnati
There has been no shortage of people prepared to write off the Patriots in 2024, a list that seemingly included the Pats themselves. They traded edge rusher Matthew Judon to Atlanta before the season, and after top-five pick Drake Maye outplayed veteran quarterback Jacoby Brissett in the preseason, the organization elected to start Brissett, reportedly out of concern the rookie might suffer an injury playing behind a porous offensive line.
Brissett took a few hits and got up from the ground grimacing at times, but winning has a way of making those blows feel a lot better on the plane ride home. The veteran threw for 121 yards on 24 pass attempts, but he played his role to a T in a 16-10 upset victory over the Bengals.
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