Gross Football Lunch – Week 1, 2026 NFL Season

Welcome back to another season of Gross Football Lunch!

For those of you who have already joined me on this journey of taking Ls in public, thank you. Your validation is what keeps me going, and without it, it would be overwhelmed with the temptation to take this column into even weirder and somehow more alienating directions. For those of you who are new here, uhm…hi. I guess. This is Gross Football Lunch, a weekly column that examines the NFL through the lens of the Confidence Pool, which is explained below. Every week, there is (almost) always Something Else. Just what constitutes this Something Else varies, but it will (almost) always be something about food, video games, or other NFL takes and observations.

As much as I understand the value of telling your audience what to expect, there’s no time. The kickoff game is tonight and I’ve barely started this column, because I’m an adult who has his shit together and not a flailing stay-at-home dad constantly cleaning up toddler piss.

Begin the Confidence Pool!

NFL Confidence Pool – Week 1

The confidence pool is a method for picking games that’s more interesting than picking games straight up, but less terrifying than picking against the spread. You pick the team you believe will win each game on the entire week’s slate, then assign a point value to that pick based on your level of confidence in it. The point values range from 1 to however-many-games-are-happening-this-week, with 1 representing your least confident pick, and the top value representing the most confident pick. When you pick a game correctly, you win the point value you assigned to that pick. When you pick incorrectly or the game ends in a tie, you get nothing. Whoever wins the most points wins the pool for the week, and there may be prizes for most points won over the course of the regular season, too.

(Always consult with your confidence pool’s organizer to make sure you fully understand your pool’s exact rules and procedures! I am not a confidence pool attorney, and this is not confidence pool legal advice. Your pool’s rules and procedures may differ from the ones I am adopting for the purposes of this column, and are in no way binding upon the rules or procedures set by any individual confidence pool organizer.)

I will be sharing my own confidence pool picks and point assignments in every weekly installment of Gross Football Lunch. I will also provide brief but concise justifications for most of these picks and assignments. I reserve the right to ignore a game entirely; not every game is interesting. Furthermore, I cannot even pretend have the time and resources necessary to understand every single team’s deal in-depth, meaning I will not always be able to weigh in intelligently on each and every game each and every week. If I can’t form an opinion worth sharing for a game, I won’t.

Before I get into the Week 1 picks, here are some general guidelines for assigning points that I have found useful in my Confidence Pool career. None of these are hard and fast rules, and in fact, I guarantee you that strict adherence to these guidelines will screw you over multiple times over throughout the course of the season. Please exercise caution! With that in mind, here are my confidence pool tips and tricks:

• The best games to place max points on are mismatches. These are games in which an excellent team is playing a terrible one. The Rams playing the Commanders is a mismatch. The Broncos playing the Jets is a mismatch. You get the idea. Put big points on these games and don’t think twice about it, even if the superior team is playing on the road.
• Better teams are always worth more points, while worse teams are always worth fewer points. Every week, you will be tempted to place big points on a mediocre team playing a terrible one when you could put those points on a great team facing quality opposition. For example, say you pick the mediocre Chargers over the woeful Raiders. You then also pick the outstanding Lions over the potentially dangerous Rams. Which team gets more points? The answer is the Lions. No matter how bad a bad team is, a mediocre team cannot create a true mismatch, and cannot be trusted with your top points. It is always best to place your top points on a demonstrably awesome team, even if that team has a tough matchup. Games between two bad teams should be assigned as few points as possible.
• Beware Divisional Matchups! There are no true mismatches when it comes to division rivalry games! Division rivals are both familiar with each other and highly motivated to kick each other’s asses. Exercise caution! If you’re tempted to place big points on a divisional game, and you will be from time to time, make sure there isn’t a non-divisional matchup that’s more worthy of thespose points.

Home teams are listed in bold. For international games, the designated home team is further noted with an asterisk*. To the picks!

Welcome to Week 1, the second scariest week of the confidence pool! No matter how many season preview materials your brain holes have ingested in the past few months, you are simply not prepared for the coming deluge of unexpected and straight-up weird results Week 1 will undoubtedly provide us. This is my “I’m not stalling, you’re stalling” way of saying that Week 1, by definition, has no real mismatches. Any and all theorizing about which teams will be good and which teams will be bad this year has no currency, and anyone joining us in this week’s confidence pool who believes they have an edge is either one of the true seers of the game (I’ve met people who can pick Week 1 with alarming accuracy, and while they were all pleasant enough their powers truly terrify me), or a complete sap in for a rude awakening.

With that in mind, the Saints still suck. If you’ve been huffing their gas you should feel bad, and if you’ve been silently passing Saints gas in the overcrowded elevator of NFL media, you should feel worse. They can not and will not match the Lions’ firepower, even on their best day. If you wanted, you could reverse the assignments for the Chargers and Jaguars, but I must caution against that. Even with Jared Verse instead of Myles Garrett, the Browns’ might have just enough pass rush juice to keep things interesting against an underwhelming offensive line. The Chargers have interior line problems of their own, but at least their tackles are good. More importantly, unless Jeremiyah Love is the Second Coming of Adrian Peterson I can’t even think of what the Cardinals’ relative strengths are or could be.

Finally, I’m going big on tonight’s game because it’s a rematch of a Super Bowl that was marginally more competitive than the NFC dogpiles of my youth. The Patriots offense may be improved, but there’s no way it’s improved enough. First the league schedules the kickoff game on a Wednesday – a day where no football has been except during COVID, and never should be again – and next, they slap together a lazy rematch and call it good enough for their captive audience. Call me an old crank if you want, but I remember a time when the first game of the season had actual intrigue.

I really have no idea how many points I should assign to the Rams; this is just my best guess. International games always carry an excess of potential chaos energy, even when played in sensible places. I have no idea what to expect of a game played halfway across the globe. I am picking the Rams because, well, they’re a better team, and I’m giving them double digits because somebody needs to take these assignments, and I at least trust the Rams will be good. My point here is that you need to exercise caution with this game. With so much uncertainty, you may be tempted to go even higher on the Rams this week. Don’t do it! It might get real weird out there, and if it does, it’s better to lose 10 or 11 points than 14 or 15.

Speaking of temptation, I really wish I could give the Eagles more points than this. I am quite certain that, in the fullness of the season to come, the Commanders are going to stink to high heaven. But this is the only certainty this game offers. No one knows what to expect of the Eagles’ overhauled offense, but it’s a good thing they overhauled it at all. Granted, they overhauled it to do the same intermediate crossers off of under center play action everyone else is doing, but surely that beats spamming Mesh every third down, no?

And speaking of being trendy, this Monday night the entire football-watching public is going to get a close look at the league’s new latest craze, which is rushing star players back onto the field after they suffered catastrophic lower body injuries. It’s a good thing Mahomes is easing back in to his role as a superstar quarterback with a cupcake matchup. I would hate for him to have done all that rehabilitation and physical therapy and surgery and such just to hurry back in time to face an atomic pass rush with the secondary to match, requiring him to use his Are We Really Sure They’re 100%? legs to gain small yardage chunks and/or keep plays alive until someone comes open. That sounds awful! I’m glad Mahomes won’t have to deal with that. Hang on a second, I’m getting some new information…

Oh dear.

If Week 1 is hard to pick because we don’t actually know which teams are good, it follows that it is also hard to pick because we don’t actually know which teams are bad, with limited exceptions. These bottom two assignments must be your bottom two assignments as well, lest you end up in a situation where your week’s success depends on one of these four teams. That said, you can pick and assign within these two games however you like. I’m picking the Raiders and giving them the higher point value because you can always trust a Kubiak to coach the run game up to adequacy. No one else in this group has that kind of juice.

Picking the Bucs at all might seem a daft choice, but I think that their revamped pass rush is going to slow the Bengals’ offense down enough to put real pressure on their defense to step up, and that’s a rough spot for the Bengals to be in. Also, in case you are in fact new here, know that I’m a Vikings fan and I will often pick the Vikings even when it’s less than sensible to do so. But for this week, I actually think the Vikings have a decent shot. Kyler Murray isn’t injured just yet, Micah Parsons will be in street clothes, and Brian Flores is going to spend every Packers possession describing his waking horror visions to their shambolic offensive line in vivid detail.

Enjoy the games, everyone!