Gross Football Lunch – Week 2, 2026 NFL Season

Recipe of the Week: Chocolate Chip Cookies

Method & Analysis:

About two years ago, the older of my two kids became aware of the concept of the chocolate chip cookie through some nefarious means or another, and, in a fit of age-appropriate but nonetheless exasperating enthusiasm for the prospect of consuming refined sugars, badgered me into making a batch. So I texted my mom for her chocolate chip cookie recipe, and she responded immediately with the recipe, which she made enough times in her parenting days to have memorized in its entirety. After making the cookies and sharing them with my kid, and sneaking a couple away for my own purposes, I brought one to my wife. She took a bite and asked, “Oh, are these T*** H****?”, at which point I got all huffy and indignant and said, “No! These are my mother’s extra special recipe!”’

Here I was, basking in my triumph, and my spouse had the audacity to question the recipe’s sacred authenticity? To think that my mother would master the baking of a chocolate chip cookie according to a recipe that was not of her (or some relative’s or family friend’s or whomever) devising. I say. I say! To add injuy to insult, I was ready to share this chocolate chip cookie recipe with the entire world through the magic of Gross Football Lunch, but now the seed of doubt had been planted. I could only on the condition that it was my mother’s and not devised my a supervillianous corporation hell bent on actually controlling the world’s supply of potable water, and my doubt grew to the point that I realized I would need to investigate before proceeding.

Well, we’re all familiar enough with what protesting too much looks like these days for this to be necessary, but for posterity I will note that the next time I went to the store, I checked the chocolate chip cookie recipe on the back of a bag of chocolate chips and whaddya know. It was exactly the same. Fortunately, I am not so immature as to have gotten snippy or even particularly disappointed to learn the origin of my beloved mother’s cookie recipe. Let’s face it, it’s a tough recipe to improve upon, and successful parenting requires doing most things the easy way. Mostly I was relieved that I didn’t try and pass a chocolate chip cookie recipe from a bag as my own, and grateful for the reminder that I’m not special.

So what changed? Why am I all of a sudden willing to ‘share’ a recipe that’s freely available to anyone with access to a grocery store and a camera? Like I said, I am a couple of years older and wiser than I was at the time. Once I was a wet behind the ears 38-year-old kid with big dreams of Making It Big in the internet football commentary blogosphere. Who else would have the audacity to create a food blog that’s also am NFL blog? This kind of innovation can only be the work of a true genius just waiting to be recognized as such.

Now I’m a hardened 40-year-old worn to the nub from even more years working in the content mines. As much as my fragile ego demands validation for scratching out my weekly columns in a handful of hours and telling myself I’ll give it a good edit so it’s actually readable and then not doing that, I also go completely insane when I get any real amount of attention. (This one time, I had post on BlueSky that got 100ish likes, and in the ensuing mania I almost threw a TV out the window.) Better to keep dancing like nobody’s watching, anyway. Also, the long-running NFL Dick Joke Jambaroo ($) – a venerated institution that I’m always worried I’m accidentally copying already – added recipes this season, and whatever tenuous claim I may have had to a unique niche in the food and sports writing spheres has been obliterated.

Point is, if I’m going to keep doing this, I’m going to need to keep doing it for myself, and if I’m going to keep doing it for myself, I’m going to need to use the Recipe of the Week portion of this column in service of whatever stupid bit and/or stylistic experiment that is amusing to me and no one else I’m toying with at the time. I’m also going to need to furnish the Recipe of the Week the easy way from time to time, because I’m a stay-at-home-parent by trade whose relationship to writing is best summarized as a dalliance. Some weeks, I hope this will yield a result I can be proud of, but other weeks, I know that the result will be half-assedly writing up a widely available public domain recipe as a metaphor for my ongoing crisis of confidence.

Preheat your oven to 375° F, then hop in your time machine so you can go back 2-3 hours and grab two sticks of butter out of the fridge and set them on the counter to soften. Combine 2 ¼ cups of flour, 1 teaspoon of baking soda, and 1 teaspoon of salt, then set aside. Once your butter is actually softened, unwrap the sticks and drop them in a large mixing bowl, then add ¾ cup of white sugar, ¾ cup of light brown sugar, and 1 teaspoon of vanilla extract. Start mixing them with the butter until they become one smooth, homogenous substance.

If you have a handheld electric mixer, this is the ideal implement for this task. If you are not in possession of an electric hand mixer, then you’re gonna have to grab a wooden spoon and get to work. Use the spoon to break the butter apart as you stir everything together; needless to say (which tends to mean extremely needful to say these days), this will be much, much, much easier if you remember to let the butter soften. The mixing will feel stiff and difficult to work with for a while until it comes together all of a sudden. Once the butter and sugars have fully merged into a smooth paste, add one egg and stir it in until it is no longer visible, then add a second egg and repeat.

Once both eggs have disappeared into the mix, it’s time to add the dry ingredients. Dump about a third of the dry ingredients into the butter/sugar/egg mixture and stir until the dry ingredients are fully incorporated. Repeat this step twice for the remaining two thirds of dry ingredients, and hey look at that! You have chocolate chip cookie dough, or at least you would if there were chocolate chips in it. So grab yourself a standard-issue 12 oz. bag of chocolate chips, cut it open, and dump the entire S.O.B. Into the dough and stir it in until the chips are more or less evenly distributed. Or at least look evenly distributed enough that if it turns out they aren’t all that well distributed, that can be a later problem instead of a now problem. Note that if you had the good fortune and privilege of using an electric hand mixer to this point, you will want to switch to a wooden spoon or spatula for the chip adding process.

By now, your over should be done preheating, so grab a cookie sheet and line it with parchment or grease it up with some butter. Once that’s done, it’s time to get our dough wads in order. Grab two spoons, scoop up a wad of cookie dough with the spoon in your dominant hand, then take the other spoon in your non-dominant hand and use it to push the dough off of the first spoon and onto the sheet. Make sure that there is space between each future cookie pile, as they will spread out considerably as they bake. As for the ideal size of this cookie, well…I don’t know what to tell you. I’m a fat kid with giant hook hands, so the cookies I make invariably end up medium-large or larger, with an average yield of 2 dozen. The back of this here bag of chocolate chips I definitely did not buy so I had a recipe to refer back to and chocolate chips to snack on while working says this recipe yields about 5 dozen cookies, and I simply do not understand how someone could get their dough scoops so small, but whatever. Just make sure there’s space between each scoop, and understand you will have to bake in batches.

Stick your completed cookie sheet onto the center rack of your oven and let it bake for 10 minutes, or until they’re starting to turn golden brown on top. Every oven is a little bit different and therefore takes a slightly different amount of time to bake a sheet of chocolate chip cookies, so consider checking them at the 8 minute-mark or so. You may need to check every minute or so until you get a feel for how long your oven takes to bake a sheet of cookies, but once you feel you have acquired this wisdom, that means you have in fact acquired it.

Once done, take your cookies out of the oven and let them cool on the sheet a bit, then use a flat spatula to move them from the sheet and onto a cooling rack. Let the sheet cool a bit further, then scoop your next batch on and bake it. Repeat this process until all your dough has been scooped up and baked into cookies, then use one of your spoons to scrape the remaining bits of dough straight into your open mouth. You know you wanna.

Finally, eat one of these damn cookies while they’re still warm! The cookies from this recipe are at their best within 24 hours, after which they get a bit dry and a bit crumbly and maybe just maybe even a bit alkaline tasting from the baking soda? I don’t know man. I just know that I don’t know chocolate chip cookies any better than the bag, so I’m stuck following its counsel until and unless I decide to search elsewhere, and I’m not gonna do it. This is as good as I can do for now, and it’s good enough for me, and it’s good enough for my kids. That’s all I can ask for.

Week 2 NFL Confidence Pool

As I intimated last week, this is the scariest week of the season for the confidence pool participant. We’ve seen all 32 teams in action, but we still don’t know much of anything. All we have is our hypotheses from the preseason, and whatever nuggets of wisdom that can be mined from comparing the two. In previous seasons, the overwhelming nature of this task made me panic, and filter my thought processes according to a deeply false binary: Should I overreact to the Week 1 results, or should I fall back on my trusty priors?

This season, I am starting to feel as though I have a better, more nuanced sense of what aspects of the Week 1 results to consider and which to discard, informed by a slightly more informed understanding of what actually happened in each game. Will this bring better results than in previous Week 2s? Probably not; in fact, I am terrified that I have tricked myself into thinking I know just enough to faceplant once again, but with greater bluster. But as a method of football analysis, this feels like a concrete enough framework to sound smarter than in previous years, when I spent the week losing gobs of picks and points as a result of terrible vibe assessment skills.

To that end, I remain reasonably confident that the Dolphins can only be so good this year, and the 49ers remain dangerous when healthy and well-coached when not. It is all but certain that the Titans stink, and that whatever misfires/growing pains/bloopers await the Eagles’ sparkly new under center copycat offense this time out cannot possibly lead to a loss here. I’m giving the max to the 9ers though, because the Eagles under Nick Sirianni are always at risk of choking on their own spit. 14 points on any divisional game is pretty rich even in a healthier epistemic environment, especially since the Cardinals have practically outdone their projections already, but goddamn the Seahawks defense is a terror beyond reason. They made Drake Maye move heaven and earth just squeak past the sticks on third downs, then popped him like a pimple in the fourth quarter. I love Jacoby Brissett as much as the next guy, but let’s be real.

It’s my third consecutive year of waiting for the Colts to collapse completely, so it should be no surprise to learn that last week’s drubbing from the Ravens – at home, no less – is all the confirmation I need to declare them screwed when up against any offense that more or less knows what it’s doing. As for the Ravens themselves, this assignment is a vote of mild confidence for their Week 1 performance, and while I’d love to give them more the Saints gave me enough of a scare last week that I need more information before I can commit to writing them off. Finally, ask not why do not have more points going against the Browns. Ask how bad the Browns’ opponent has to be before you would only assign them single digit points.

With the exception of the Bills, who won a coin flip game against another AFC contender (and if you dispute that the game was coin flip, consider what could have been different if the Texans had recovered the late Bills fumble), this is the tier of mild to moderate disappointments. These disappointments include the Lions, who gave very serious consideration to blowing it against the Saints, and whose defense remains largely theoretical. The Bills should score a ton, and will also have the mega-hyped home crowd and the home opener of the new stadium on their side.

The Texans, for their part, cost me 10 points and didn’t get as much pressure as expected, but they also ran the ball well for the first time since who even knows at this point. The glory days of Arian Foster, maybe? I didn’t see any of the Bengals last week but I’m given to understand they stunk up the joint. Since I never took the Bengals all that seriously to begin with and barely survived a mediocre opponent, I’m comfortable going against them when facing quality opposition. The Broncos also looked like dog plops on Monday – it’s hard to live up to your billing as an elite defense when you can’t tackle worth a cuss – but I trust the coaching staff too much to abandon them. Perhaps more importantly, I must caution against jumping to conclusions with the Jaguars. Yeah they looked great alright, but it was the Browns.

And last but not quite least (as the final five games will attest), here is an all-of-a-sudden exciting matchup between two teams I simply cannot pin down. Is the Giants offense passable, or were they just facing a terrible defense? I don’t mean to be rude but the Fangio defense and its descendants are known both for being vulnerable against the run and difficult to teach and install to the coverage unit; as an Ed Donatell survivor, those wide open throws late in the first half stink of the misunderstood coverage rules and botched player communication endemic to a poorly installed Fangio defense.

But I can no longer write the Giants off as a year away, and I definitely can’t assume the Rams will get their shit together and roll. While it was incredibly funny to watch the Rams eat shit for their travel planning hubris ($), I am left wondering if they are, in fact, anywhere nearly as good as expected. Stafford played even worse than the phrase “life-hacking jet lag” implies, and as you know, Myles Garrett is out for who knows how long. This game went from an easy double-digit assignment to a 6-points-with-gritted-teeth one in about 72 hours.

Okay Bears fans, I know you’ve been waiting on this for a while, so take however much time you need to be excited before you sit down so I can politely remind you that the Bears are not going to score 59 entire points with any regularity. That said, they will score a lot of points this year, and they will probably score a lot of points this Sunday, as Ben Johnson has historically remained a step ahead of Brian Flores in game planning. The Vikings will need to play outstanding run defense and exploit the weaknesses of the Bears offensive line to give themselves a real chance, and even if they do, I can’t trust Carson Wentz even against this defense.

The Chargers have really taken a beating in the papers for losing to the Cardinals, and while that’s fair and while I believe everything I’ve heard about how terrible they looked on offense, I am also willing to write this loss off as a Week 1 faceplant. Shit like this happens all the time, especially when a new offensive coordinator is installing a new offense. Remember what the Jaguars offense looked like this time last year? It sure wasn’t anywhere close to what it looked like in December, I can tell you that much. Lest you infer this means I am still any sort of high on the Chargers, well, check the points at stake here.

Enjoy the games, everyone!