Raphael Stevens

The Falcons, who play in the home city of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., are making voting rights a priority this season. More

After an opening week filled with shocking upsets, the league’s expected contenders will try to return things to normalcy. More

The Saints and the Vikings became the latest teams to invest in the run, signing Alvin Kamara and Dalvin Cook to five-year deals. They are likely to experience buyer’s remorse sooner rather than later. More

A team that has scraped together only 12 wins in their last three seasons, combined, started this one with another loss. More

Forget celebrating the return of N.F.L. football by lauding Julio Jones’s hands, Christian McCaffrey’s legs and Lamar Jackson’s arm. Let’s celebrate it in a more ghoulish, and maybe pettier, way by looking at the players and teams who didn’t fare so well.Two Relocated Veteran QuarterbacksSome of the teams that acquired new passers weren’t feeling so great on Monday morning.Tom Brady arrived in Tampa, Fla., on a wave of enthusiasm, but carrying his age, 43, along with those six Super Bowl rings.A game in New Orleans is not the easiest baptism, but his performance was lackluster: 23 for 36 for 239 yards with two interceptions, one of them a pick-6. Brady was soundly outplayed by the youngster Drew Brees, 41, and the Buccaneers lost, 34-23.Brady and Buccaneers Coach Bruce Arians on Sunday acknowledged that Brady was at fault on the picks. “I made some just bad, terrible turnovers,” Brady said. “I obviously have got to do a lot better job.” (Arians on Monday pointed a finger at receiver Mike Evans for the first interception.)Philip Rivers, 38, has always been a yards machine (nearly 60,000 in his career), and he got 363 more on Sunday with the Indianapolis Colts, his new team after 16 years with the San Diego and Los Angeles Chargers. But the Colts couldn’t pull away from an unfearsome Jacksonville Jaguars team that they were expected to beat by 8.Rivers had chances to win the game late, but threw an interception with four minutes left. Given a final opportunity, he led his team to the Jaguars’ 26 with a minute left, then threw three straight incompletions, and the Colts lost, 27-20.Two Quarterbacks Looking Over Their ShouldersRivers’s replacement in Los Angeles, Tyrod Taylor, got a win, at least. But it was against the lowly Cincinnati Bengals, who were playing behind the rookie quarterback Joe Burrow, and it came by just 3 points. In a game that was poorly played by both sides, Taylor was an uninspiring 16 for 30 for 208 yards. There have already been calls to replace him with the first-round pick Justin Herbert.As the Brady-less New England Patriots were startling their fans with a quarterback, Cam Newton, who ran for 75 yards and threw for only 155, Ryan Fitzpatrick was throwing three interceptions for the Miami Dolphins, who lost, 21-11. Fitzpatrick’s adjusted yards per pass figure was an anemic 1.9, comfortably the worst in the league.With the Dolphins unlikely to be sensational this year, fans may be clamoring for the rookie Tua Tagovailoa sooner rather than later.The Guy Who Traded DeAndre HopkinsWhen the Houston Texans traded DeAndre Hopkins and a fourth-round pick to the Arizona Cardinals for David Johnson and a second- and fourth-rounder, plenty of people said it was a bad trade. After Week 1, “bad” doesn’t seem bad enough to describe the inequity of the swap.Kyler Murray connected with Hopkins 14 times for 151 yards, and the Cardinals, 6½-point underdogs, won at San Francisco. It was a career high in receptions for Hopkins. (It’s a good thing, too, because Murray didn’t really play that well otherwise.)At least Johnson was OK for the Texans on Thursday in a loss to the Chiefs, rushing 11 times for 77 yards.The Cleveland BrownsMaybe just lock this one in for the rest of the season.Most of Sunday’s games were fairly close. And then there was the Browns game.Cleveland lost to the Ravens, 38-6. Quarterback Baker Mayfield managed only 189 yards in the air, and the Browns never looked competitive.Yes, they were facing one of the best players in the game, the reigning most valuable player, Lamar Jackson, who completed 20 of 25 passes for 275 yards and three touchdowns. But at least some of that success came because of Browns defensive lapses.The Browns have often been the butt of jokes, but when this season began, there was at least some optimism, thanks to running back Nick Chubb and hopes for improvement from Mayfield. The Browns were at least rated above the league’s potential laughingstocks like the Jaguars, the Bengals, and um, “Football Team.” Some went so far as to predict a .500 season, or better.After a schooling by a very strong team, the Browns may be resetting expectations.The 100-Yard RusherKansas City’s Clyde Edwards-Helaire was the only running back taken in the first round of the draft, with the last pick of the round. He justified the selection with a 138-yard game on Thursday night. Could it have been the start of a renaissance for the running game?No. Although several runners got into the 90s on Sunday, not one hit the 100-yard mark.In last year’s opening week, five rushers ran for 100. Season long, there were 108 100-yard games, an average of more than six a week. More

NEW ORLEANS — The ritual of Saints football went on almost as normal.The Rev. R. Tony Ricard, the pastor at St. Gabriel the Archangel Roman Catholic Church and a New Orleans Saints chaplain, ended 10:30 a.m. Mass promptly, a neat hour after it began, dispensing with one Sunday rite before the second, a late afternoon home game against the Tom Brady Buccaneers, took hold of the deeply Catholic city.The draw of Brady vs. Brees, a head-to-head matchup between two of the N.F.L.’s most familiar icons, meant a prime afternoon TV slot but a relatively late start for New Orleans fans, who are generally a six-pack deep for a typical 1 p.m. kickoff, glommed together for a pregame concert in the Champions Square area aside the Superdome or stirring vats of something that started with a roux while packed underneath the Interstate 10 overpass that bounds the northwest side of the stadium grounds.Instead, black and gold “no tailgating” signs punched the muddy ground on Perdido Street, a warning to no one in particular, since most people in town packed the party inside homes and bars, sent there by a no-fans-at-the-stadium ruling for Week 1 and the surprising threat of Tropical Storm Sally, scheduled to smack the city Monday. The emptiness lent an eeriness to the already dystopian feel of football’s return without one of its most loyal congregations.What is football’s game day ritual without fans?A made-for-TV event, a presentation meant for the broadest range of consumers, across the highest-bidding platforms.N.F.L. games have prioritized the TV audience over everything else in recent years, stopping game action so often for broadcast breaks and analysis that whole customs have risen to fill the downtime — everything from scoreboard competitions to dog-fetching exhibitions. But with coronavirus pandemic guidelines in place, even the pretense that games are meant for local fans is gone, rendering each stadium merely a soundstage rather than a cathedral to sport.The air horns that assistant coaches squawked to signal changeovers between units in warm-ups needed only to have been whistles, since there was no pregame clamor to overcome. The national anthem, such a point of emphasis for protest and patriotism for the TV audience, was piped in from a singer performing in a different area of the stadium. (Both teams stood while it played.)After it ended, the ’90s classic “Return of the Mack” hummed at the league-mandated 70 decibels, low enough to sound as if it were coming from a party a block away, before the team captains, masked, met at the 50-yard line for the coin flip.“Even just kind of that little buzz in the stadium that they create in between plays or during the game at 70 decibels, that just feels like a whisper compared to what it normally is,” Drew Brees said.Tom Brady celebrated his first touchdown as a Buccaneer, a two-yard quarterback sneak, by spiking the ball and shouting, the sounds of both traveling up to the 500-level press box after the broadcast feed. Before the extra-point attempt, the ominous cawing of dozens of crows turned out to be the sound of the grounds crew raising the net behind the goal posts, the squeaky wheels of the pulley system unmuted by the normal revelry.The Coronavirus OutbreakSports and the VirusUpdated Sept. 14, 2020Here’s what’s happening as the world of sports slowly comes back to life:The Superdome in New Orleans had a dystopian feel as football returned without one of its most loyal congregations of fans. Oh, and Tom Brady flopped as the Saints beat the Buccaneers.The United States Tennis Association has no regrets about holding a U.S. Open without fans, Roger Federer or Rafael Nadal.Enrique Oliu, a blind radio broadcaster for the Tampa Bay Rays, relies on crowd noise and on-field sounds to do his job. This season, he has had to adjust more than anyone.It was a ragged game, with both sides committing all the miscues of a preseason affair. Only, without a deafening flock of supporters, there was nowhere to place blame for the jitters that prompted false starts and a muffed kick return.The game’s momentum finally started to gather in the third quarter when the Buccaneers fought back from Brady’s second interception of the game to narrow their deficit to one touchdown.As he looked to a reliable target, Rob Gronkowski, to convert on second-and-4 from his own 28-yard line, Brady was rocked by defensive end Cameron Jordan. On third down, missing the home crowd and sensing a momentum-changing moment, the Saints’ inactive players began whirling towels and shouting from their socially distanced seats in the stands. In the nearly noiseless stadium, they could easily be heard on the field.“You run out, and obviously you’re used to the energy and the emotion in the Dome,” Brees said after his team’s 34-23 win. “The fans, obviously, you know with each and every play you’re waiting for that fan reaction, right? That big cheer on a big offensive play or a big defensive stop or a special teams play or whatever it might be.”The Saints had all of those plays — blocking a field goal in the first half and forcing a muffed kick return in the second — with enough pass-interference calls to draw groans and enough Alvin Kamara touchdowns to merit a second line at the finale.But with the team’s faithful out of earshot, the game could have been anywhere. More

The return of professional football to a nation living on a raw and perilous edge, struggling to confront a lethal virus and trying to heal its deep racial wounds, offered fans a tense and unlikely paradox. More

Cam Newton looked terrific, Tom Brady looked fairly terrible, and there were upsets all over the place in a wild slate of games. More