VITO'S VIEWS

—The opening weekend of the season will feature five national games — four in prime time. Three of the five are on network TV. Don’t be surprised if there is a lot of sloppy play because teams don’t practice as much as they did back in the day. The league ended things like two-a-days in training camp to make the game safer which means it takes teams two or three game to get in top shape. Upsets are common in the oddsmakers dont have a good handle on the teams yet. And the odds on 11 of the games are about a field goal. And eight are division games.

–Not a great week for the survivor pools. Denver is a popular choice as a 7.5-point choice over the Titans, the worst team in the league last year, but who knows how rookie Cam Ward will play in his debut. The Cardinals are a 6.5-point choice over the Saints, but the Cardinals tend to be inconsistent. The Eagles are 7.5-point choices over the Cowboys and the Commanders are a 6.5-point pick over the Giants, but both are division games.The Bengals are a 5.5-point pick over the Browns, but the Bengals often start slowly and lost their opener last year when they were heavily favored,   

–The weekend starts with the usual Thursday night with the defending champions at home. But the Eagles will host the Cowboys. Granted, the Eagles and Cowboys are divisional rivals, and the Cowboys tend to be a popular team, but owner Jerry Jones just traded their best player, Micah Parsons, and the Eagles could dominate this game.

   –The game of the weekend is the Sunday night matchup between Buffalo and Baltimore. The Bills are a slight favorite and are favored in every game this year. But Baltimore is confident think they have their best team since they  got Lamar Jackson. Both Jackson and Josh Allen are looking to make the Super Bowl for the first time this year and it is a critical matchup for both teams.

  –Kansas City and San Diego play in a rare Friday night game because technically the high school football season doesn’t start for another week, although many high schools now start before Labor Day and will be playing this Friday. As part of their deal to get an antitrust exemption, the NFL agreed not to play on Friday nights during the high school season. This is a critical division game for both teams and quarterbacks. The Chiefs and Patrick Mahomes want to rebound after their Super Bowl loss while Justin erbert wants to prove he can take the Chargers to the Super Bowl. The game is on YouTubeTV but will be free. The Lions-Packers game is another  important division game and will be the Sunday doubleheader game. The Monday night game is also a division game with Minnesota at Chicago, but neither is considered a Super Bowl contender.

Back in 1993, the Cowboys started out 0-2 while Emmitt Smith was holding out.

After the second loss, owner Jerry Jones caved and gave him what he wanted to get him back, and the Cowboys went on to win the Super Bowl.

Jones’ style as a tough negotiator hasn’t changed over the years. He often plays hardball with his star players, then winds up paying them more than he would have if he had signed them earlier. Dak Prescott was the latest example last year.

Now Jones is doing the same thing with Micah Parsons. As an elite pass rusher, it is no secret that Parsons wll get a deal over $40 million a year. But Jones has not only not gotten him signed but he tried to bypass the agent and talk directly to Parsons, then tried to turn it into a negotiating session and then said they had a deal.

Now Parsons is demanding a trade and things are at a stalemate. Parsons showed up to camp to avoid a fine, but said he has a bad back and can’t practice. Jalen Ramsey did the same thing with the same agent to get out of Jacksonville.

If history is any indication, Jones will eventually cave and get him signed, but he never seems to learn his lesson. Which helps explain why the Cowboys havent been in the Super Bowl since 1995.

Jones, though, follows his golden rule. He has the gold and rules even if his style isn’t the best for getting to the Super Bowl.

Some teams like the exposure of being featured on Hard Knocks.

The Bills are not one of them. 

They are appearing on the 25th edition of the famed HBO series but are not happy about it and haven’t promoted their appearance on the show at all. General manager Brandon Beane and Sean McDermott have long said they feel the show is a distraction and could lead to bad PR.

It didn’t help that last year Giants general manager Joe Schoen didn’t come across well when he talked about Saquan Barkley testing the market even though owner Wellington Mara wanted to keep him. We all know how all that turned out as Barkley signed with the Eagles and won a Super Bowl ring.

But if the first show was any indication, the Bills have nothing to worry about.

There is a good storyline about this season for the Bills. They are under pressure to finally get to the Super Bowl after failing to make it despite winning the division the last five years. They are favored in the preseason odds in every game. Not that anybody expects them to go undefeated, but it is kind of a Super Bowl-or-bust season. The show mentioned the heartbreak of the Bills repeatedly losing to the Chiefs in the playoffs, and of their four trips to the Super Bowl in the 1990s without winning one.

But the show didn’t dwell on the pressure they face this year or that Josh Allen needs a Super Bowl ring to be part of his legacy, although they did spend a lot of time stressing what Allen means to the Bills.

And they had the usual personal moments like Dion Dawkins taking his kids drifting.

The Bills may wind up thinking it was a positive experience. And always interesting to see what happens behind the scenes. 

Of course, they don’t mention that no team has won the Super Bowl in the year they appeared on Hard Knocks.

Maybe the Bills can break that streak.

The first pick in the draft usually gets the most attention on draft day.

Not this year.

Commissioner Roger Goodell had barely announced that Cam Ward was the first pick by the Tennessee Titans when the Jacksonville Jaguars stole the show by trading up to pick Travis Hunter with the second pick to play both wide receiver and defensive back.

But Ward is used to being overshadowed. Coming out of high school, the only team to offer him a scholarship was the University of Incarnate Word, a private Catholic school in San Antonio. He played in the Wing-T in high school and threw an average of only 12 passes a game in his senior year, so the bigger schools didn’t take a flyer on him.

Ward passed for 47 touchdowns and 4,648 yards in his second season, then transferred to Washington State where his Incarnate Word coach, Eric Morris, had been hired as the offensive coordinator.

After two years, Ward had graduated and announced for the NFL draft in 2024, but scouts didn’t rank him as a first rounder even though he passed for more than 3,000 yards both years at Washington State, so he decided to go to Miami for his final season of eligibility.

He jumped up the charts when he led Miami to a 10-2 record and was named the Davey O’Brien and Manning award winner as the top quarterback in college football and was fourth in Heisman Trophy balloting. 

Although the Titans decided to make him the top pick and declined offers to trade the pick, he wasn’t hyped the way Trevor Lawrence was as the top pick, although Lawrence has yet to live up to that hype.

Now Ward gets another chance to show he has been underrated. He figured to be the Titans starter but once Will Levis was lost for the season, there was no doubt he would start.

Ward has a big challenge because the Titans were the NFL’s worst team last year .

In an interview with The Athletic, Ward admitted he has something to prove.

“I don’t think I am being welcomed with open arms,” he said. “I was the first pick. I am blessed to be that. But at the end of the day, there’s a target on my back. There’s a target on everyone’s back in the league, but I’m trying to prove myself to my teammates.”

He may not have a target on his  back, but he will be in the spotlight.

And the Titans aren’t putting too much pressure on him. General manager Mike Borgoni said, “He is a rookie. Just like all these other guys, he is going to make mistakes and learn from it, but you want to see growth.”

If his past history is any indication, he will do more than show growth.

And he comes from an athletic family   

His father, Calvin, played football and his mother, Patrice, coached high school basketball for nearly 25 years. His younger maternal cousin, Kyron Drones, is a quarterback at Virginia Tech and he has several older cousins who played in the NFL including Quentin Jammer and Quandre Diggs.

The next step for Ward is try to show that the Titans made the right move in making  him the top pick. 

Give Anthony Richardson credit.

He admitted it was his fault when he suffered a pinky injury when Baltimore’s David Ojabo got a free rush on Richardson and knocked the Colts quarterback out of the first preseason game.

It wasn’t the offensive line’s fault.

As Colts coach Shane Steichen said, “That is a five-man protection right there, and that’s the hot side right there. That’s what happened.”

Richardson was responsible for recognizing the unblocked defender and getting the ball out quickly.

Richardson agreed it was his fault after the game for not properly diagnosing the play.

“I just have to be ready to get the ball out,” Richardson said. 

He was fortunate it wasn’t a major injury, but it still wasn’t a good look for a third-year quarterback dogged by injuries who has yet to prove he can stay healthy. And who has to do a better job of reading defenses. That is why the Colts signed free agent Daniel Jones, but it is uncertain if Jones is the answer after he flopped  with the Giants. He wasn’t particularly impressive when he came in after Richardson was injured. 

So the Colts’ quarterback situation remains in a state of flux with the start of the regular season just weeks away.

If Richardson and/or Jones isn’t effective, it’s going to be a long season for the Colts — and they will be looking for another quarterback next season. 

As teams begin or the 2025 season, here are five key teams to watch:

–Can the Eagles repeat to follow in the footsteps of the Chiefs, who repeated in 2023?

–Can  the Chiefs become the second team since the 1972 Dolphins to lose the Super Bowl one year and win it the next? They can also join the Packers, Steelers and 49ers as fourth team in modern era to win four Super Bowls in a decade.

–The Bills are favored to win every game, which they won’t do. But can they finally bring a Lombardi Trophy to Buffalo?

–The Lions had another disappointing exit in the playoffs, going 15-2 and losing to the Commanders. Can they finally make it to the Super Bowl for the first time this year?

–Lamar Jackson is all world in the regular season but not so much in the playoffs. Can he finally play as well in the playoffs as he does in the regular season?      

It is not unheard of for a coach who has had success to have a falling out with an owner.

In 1987, then-San Francisco owner Eddie DeBartolo was furious when the 49ers lost a playoff game to Minnesota and failed to make the Super Bowl for the third year in a row. He stripped coach Bill Walsh of his president’s title. In 1988, Walsh won his third title and then quit. It was an ill-advised move that cost Walsh a chance at winning more titles, although he later patched things up and ran the front office. George Seifert won two more rings after he left.

Then in March of 1994, Dallas coach Jimmy Johnson was furious when owner Jerry Jones told reporters at a league meeting that 500 coaches could win with the Cowboys. Instead of brushing it off and saying that was just Jerry being Jerry, Johnson decided to leave and he agreed to a settlement and left. He took a job in Miami, but he lost a chance to threepeat with the Cowboys and went 38-31 in Miami before retiring as a coach. He then had a broadcasting career with Fox.

And now we have the Bob and Bill show which now looks like it is going to last for the forseeable future.

Patriots owner Bob Kraft fired Bill Belichick, who won six Super Bowls with Tom Brady at quarterback but saw the team collapse after Brady left. Meanwhile, Brady won his seventh ring in Tampa Bay to foster the narrative that he was more responsible for the Patriots success than Belichick.

At the press conference announcing his departure, Kraft and Belichick made nice and said it was a mutual decision.

But it didn’t take long for it to become obvious that there was a rift between the two men. The Patriots made a 10-part documentary about their success and did not paint Belichick in a positive light. And Belichick recently published a 304-page book in which he didn’t even mention Kraft’s name, much less give him any credit.

Meanwhile, Belichick wasn’t hired by any NFL team last year. He only had one interview with the Falcons and they passed with speculation that Kraft may have warned them about the perils of hiring him. So he has taken a college job at North Carolina and gone public that he has a girlfriend nearly 50 years younger than him — a relationship that has raised a lot of eyebrows. And Kraft is trying to get the team on track when he fired Jerod Mayo after one losing season and hired former Patriot Mike Vrabel.

But neither Kraft nor Belichick seem ready to move on. Kraft seemed to show that in a recent interview.

“I gave up a No. 1 draft pick for a coach that had only won a little over 40 percent of his games to get him out (of New York),” Kraft said in the “Dudes on Dudes” postcast co-hosted by Julian Edelman and Rob Gronkowski last month. “I don’t know if there are any Jets fans here. I think getting Bill Belichick to come to the Patriots in 1999 was a big risk, and I got hammered in the Boston area, but he was with us 24 years.”

Belichick could have let that pass. After all, it was a risk for Kraft since Belichick had a losing record in Cleveland and resigned as head coach of the Jets after Bill Parcells retired to the front office.

“As I told Robert multiple times through the years, I took a big risk by taking the New England Patriots head coaching job,” Belichick said. “I already had an opportunity to be the Head Coach of the New York Jets, but the ownership situation was unstable.

“I had been warned by multiple previous Patriots’ coaches, as well as other members of other NFL organizations and the media, that the New England job was going to come with many internal obstacles,” he said. “I made it clear that we would have to change the way the team was managed to regain the previous attained success.”   

It wasn’t that risky for Belichick because he did not have a job and teams probably wouldn’t have been rushing to hire him after the way he refused to take the Jets job and had a losing record in Cleveland.

Anyway, it is obvious from most recent incident that the two men with big egos haven’t patched things up.

And the Bob and Bill show will continue. Will the Patriots win without Belichick? Will Belichick win on the college level at a school noted more for basketball than football? The Patriots are building a statue for Brady. Will they build one for Belichick?

We will see.

Call it a marriage of convenience.

The Steelers was looking for a veteran quarterback who can win now and Aaron Rodger was looking for a team that he thought would be a good fit for him.

So after spending the offseason deciding whether he wants to play, Rodgers agreed to a one year contract with the Steelers at age 41.

It is a gamble for both sides. The Steelers decided not to keep Russell Wilson and Justin Fields and signed Mason Rudolph and Skylar Thompson and drafted Will Howard on the sixth round. But they preferred to go with Rodgers, who kept them dangling the whole off season.

Rodgers has to prove he has something left in the tank. Last year, he threw for 3897 yards while completing 63 per cent of his passes and throwing 28  touchdown passes and 11 picks.

But the Jets finished 5-12 and the Steelers are looking for Rodgers to get them in the playoffs and win at least a playoff game. Rodgers will be 42 in December and Tom Brady is the only quarterback to win a playoff game at that age.

Coach Mike Tomlin, who wanted to bring in Rodgers, has never had a losing season but hasn’t won a playoff game since 2016,  They’ve made the playoffs four of the last five seasons but  have lost their first playoff game each year.

Meanwhile, the Steeler fans, spoiled by watching their team win six Super Bowls, are getting frustrated with many calling for the Steelers to fire Tomlin.

But the Steelers haven’t fired a coach since 1968 and have had just three coaches since 1969 — Chuck Noll, Bill Cowher and Tomlin. Art Rooney II, the son of Dan Rooney and grandson of team founder Art Rooney Sr., is sticking with Tomlin.

And Tomlin is betting on Rodgers being the answer for at least one year even though the Steelers are in the same division with Baltimore and Cincinnati. Tomlin and the Steelers will find out this year if he made a good bet. 

The 49ers recently made a big bet on Brock Purdy’s future when they gave him a five-year, $265 million extension.

Now the question is whether Purdy can play well enough to justify  the contract.

There has been much debate about how good  Purdy is and is he more than a game manager surrounded by a lot of talent.

Which is probably why the 49ers have given themselves an out after guaranteeing him $115.346 million for the first three years, according to PFT. If they cut him after two years on April 1, 2027, the can avoid paying him $55.05 million in guaranteed money for 2028. 

So in some ways, there is no pressure on Purdy he will pocket over $100 million no matter how he plays in the next two years. 

On the other hand, he has $55 million at stake depending on how he plays. And the debate how good he is will continue.

As the Eagles plan to bid for a repeat, they will still be able to use one of their best weapons — The Tush Push.

The Eagles are so good at it that a majority of the teams tried to ban it for the upcoming season but fell two votes shy. They need 24 and got 22. Nine teams teams joined the Eagles in voting to save it. Seven were from the AFC and they only play the Eagles once every four years.

The debate at the recent owners meeting in Minneapolis got very intense. Owner Jeff Lurie gave an hour long-speech and concluded it by saying it is “every teen’s wet dream” to devise a play that other teams can not stop so they want to ban it. Then league exec Troy Vincent admonished Lurie for using that phrase with women in the room, which was a strange thing to say. And retired Eagle center Jason Kelce gave a speech endorsing the idea.

The opposition often said it could lead to injuries although there is no history of it causing injuries. Their real complaint is that they haven’t learned to stop it and they aren’t good at doing it themselves. Buffalo is the second-best team in doing it and their owner voted to end it. 

Another interesting fact is that Warren Sharp reported teams are more likely to pass than run on fourth and run even though the sneak is more effective. They even run with a running back even though the quarterback sneak is more effective. They need to implement a better quarterback sneak.

Now the question is whether teams will find a way to stop the Eagles’ Tush Push or whether it will continue to give them an advantage this season.