NFL Results: Bears, Bills and Ravens Roll on Historic Sunday
The league’s opening Sunday had crooked numbers, clean finishes and a few teams looking awfully ordinary.
Leo Lupo5 min read
The first big Sunday of the NFL season came out swinging, and a few teams looked like they’d been hit in the mouth before the coffee got cold. Chicago, Buffalo and Baltimore all walked off with wins on a day that had the league piling up records and the scoreboard operators earning their pay. That’s September football for you: one part promise, one part circus, and a whole lot of pretending we know exactly what we’re seeing after 60 minutes.
What stood out wasn’t just the winners. It was the way some of the supposed contenders played like they were still sorting out the furniture.
Chicago keeps giving Caleb Williams room to breathe
The Chicago Bears found a way to take care of business, and that matters because this franchise has spent too many autumns tripping over its own shoelaces. If you’ve been following the early chatter around Chicago, the growth of Caleb Williams is the headline everyone wants to pin to the wall. He’s not just surviving; he’s starting to look comfortable, which is a different and much healthier animal.
That’s why the Bears’ early-season progress feels tied to Caleb Williams and the coaching staff’s willingness to stop acting like every play has to be a lecture. Chicago still has rough edges. Plenty of them. But there’s a steadier feel to the operation now, and that’s no small thing for a team that has spent the last few years collecting “next year” stories like expired coupons.
The internal pressure never really leaves that building, though. I wrote recently about the way the Bears’ offense was starting to click in Bears Week 1 Stats: Caleb Williams Sparks Chicago's Offense, and Sunday gave that notion a bit more steel. It’s early, yes. Everything in September is early. Still, Chicago finally looks like a team trying to build something instead of merely hoping to stumble into it.
Buffalo and Baltimore look like they brought their own weather
Buffalo Bills wins usually come with a certain blunt force. No poetry, no fuss. Just chunks of yardage, pressure on the quarterback, and enough talent to make the other sideline feel smaller by the quarter. The Bills got theirs on a day when the league was blowing past old marks, and they did it with the same familiar attitude: keep feeding the machine until the other side breaks.
The Baltimore Ravens are built from the same old NFL brick-and-mortar principles. Run it, hit you, make you defend every inch. That style doesn’t always make for glossy TV, but it ages better than most of the league’s fancy ideas. Baltimore’s win mattered because it was the kind that reminds everybody there’s still room in this league for teams that know who they are and don’t spend Sundays trying on somebody else’s coat.
September doesn’t hand out truth serum, but it does expose the frauds faster than the market does.
Buffalo and Baltimore both looked like outfits that have done the work. That doesn’t mean they’re headed straight to February. It means they’re not fooling themselves, and that alone puts them ahead of half the league by one week in.
The Chargers got mugged at home and that’s not a typo
The weirdest part of the day might have been what happened out in Los Angeles, where the Los Angeles Chargers were supposed to be the polished, playoff-minded side and instead got shoved around by an Arizona Cardinals group plenty of people had already consigned to the league’s basement. That’s the sort of result that makes a whole stack of preseason predictions look silly in a hurry.
And let’s not kid ourselves: a lot of folks had Arizona penciled in for the bottom of the pile. Maybe some still do. That’s fair enough. But the Cardinals came in, played loose, and took advantage of a Chargers team that looked far too willing to believe its own reputation. That’s the danger with “contender” labels in this league. They’re soft until you earn them every Sunday.
I’d point you to the earlier shocker in Arizona Cardinals vs. Los Angeles Chargers: Week 1 Upset Shock if you want the fuller outline of how nasty that loss was. The quick version is this: the Chargers cannot wear the good-team costume and expect the league to applaud. Not with that kind of home-field dud.
A record Sunday says more about depth than drama
The league loves its shiny numbers, and Sunday handed them a pile of them. Fine. Fans like points. Networks like points. Coaches, on the other hand, usually like the parts of a game that don’t turn into a six-hour migraine. When record-breaking days happen this early, they often mean defenses are behind, offenses are ahead, and a bunch of clubs are still figuring out who can do what without the training wheels.
That’s not a complaint. It’s reality. September football has always been a scrap heap of incomplete identities. Some teams arrive organized. Others arrive with a playbook and a prayer. The trick is sorting the real gains from the noise.
And here’s my read, forty years into this racket: the teams that look calm in Week 1 usually carry it longer than the ones trying to win the press conference. I’ve seen too many rosters bristle with summer confidence and then fold the first time somebody punches them back. The good clubs, the durable ones, tend to be a little boring early. They tackle. They protect the ball. They don’t spend half the afternoon chasing their own mistakes. That’s why Chicago’s cleaner steps, Buffalo’s familiar violence, and Baltimore’s businesslike approach matter more than the bloated score totals.
The league is still young enough that nobody should be handing out medals or eulogies. But you can already see the outlines. Chicago wants out of the mud. Buffalo and Baltimore want to stay on the map. Arizona just reminded the Chargers that reputation doesn’t stop a run game, and a shiny offseason doesn’t block a pass rush.
The next few weeks will tell us which of these Sunday winners are for real and which ones were just dressed well for one afternoon. Either way, nobody gets to coast. Not in this league. Not for long.
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