So, I usually won’t do a little preamble for these kind of things, but since this is a new series, allow me to set it up.

When I watch football every week, I often get a lot of ideas, or more so fragments, for potential stories and articles. But, they aren’t long enough to stretch out into full length pieces, and very often end up just fading away into oblivion. This is a series aimed at trying to change that.

The goal is that, the more weeks that go on in the NFL season, the more thoughts I will have on the games, the players, and the storylines. Hence, the amount of thoughts increasing by one every week. Although, I can already tell that by the time we hit double digits, I’ll wonder why I ever decided to do this.

But at any rate, I hope you enjoy this new format and follow along each week. The early weeks will be slow, but it should pick up in no time. It’s just me and you, and some thoughts I wrote down.

One: I had initially planned on making my first thought rather overarching. I was going to talk about what Week 1 means for your season, and why Week 2 might actually be more important to the season than your opener is. I was looking at the playoff chances for teams who start 2-0 vs 0-2, and all of that stuff.

And then, Sunday night happened. Baltimore vs Buffalo. I thought it was going to be a great game, just not in the way it unfolded. The Bills pull off an incredible 15-point comeback, scoring two touchdowns and the game-winning field goal all in the dying minutes of the game to absolutely steal one from the Ravens.

It was one the greatest Week 1 games I’ve ever seen, one of the greatest Sunday Night Football games I’ve ever seen, and honestly, maybe one of the greatest games I’ve seen, period.

Mike Tirico said it best as NBC closed out their broadcast. “This is a game we will talk about for years.”

There’s so many angles you can come at this game with. The last home opener at Highmark Stadium. The historic comeback. Buffalo’s kicker being so new that he doesn’t even know all of his teammates’ names yet. But I want to talk about a fourth down play.

On 4th & 3, with the Ravens still in possession at their own 38-yard line, Baltimore had a choice to make. Buffalo had just used their final timeout to stop the clock one last time, at 1:33, and the Ravens were reeling from a late-game Bills offensive surge.

On the broadcast, Chris Collinsworth was advocating for the Ravens to go for it. It was a crazy idea, considering the circumstances of the game in that moment…but he was exactly right.

Look, hindsight is always 20/20, but knowing that the Bills were going to run out the clock and kick a game winner anyways, Baltimore punted on the last chance they had to put the game’s fate in their own hands. I honestly believe that, if the Ravens went for it there, they would have got the first down. Buffalo had no answers for Baltimore when they got aggressive, and the Ravens have more than enough weapons to pick up three yards, whether by air or ground.

We’ll never know if Baltimore actually would have made it, and head coach John Harbaugh would have had a lot of questions to answer had it failed. But, he’s already answering questions about a team who coughed up a 15 point lead with less than four minutes to go.

Pick your poison, I suppose.