The 2024 NFL Week 1 Roundup | Beef

Define Awkward

February in the NFL is always a month of rejoice and reflection for team ownership. It’s a month to celebrate the fiercest powerhouses in football fearlessly stretching and grasping for the stars. It’s a time to burnish (or think about refurbishing) some of the most lucrative and revered franchise money minting machinery in all of sports. Too, February serves as an inflection point, as a reset for the new Season that dawns. Lately, owners have come to lament February with naked apprehension. But for reasons their own making. In their own telling, February is now Beef Month. Just last year, the NFL Players Association (the union representing professional football players) began making public player-voiced team report cards grading all 32 clubs in the NFL across 11 tangible categories. The results were not pretty; in some cases, as revolting as they were eye-watering. From standing sewage to rodent infestations to plane seating assignments and more, players pulled no punches and in doing so exposed the NFL as not quite the shiny, glamorous and moneyed athletic engine we all make it out to be. The NFLPA report cards are quintessential employee satisfaction surveys no employer would ever want released for public consumption. But that’s what we’ve been handed and it’s certainly a delight to peek into the grievances of millionaires laid bare at the feet of their billionaire owners. Professional athletes, might they be just like you and me?

As president of the NFLPA, JC Tretter (former Browns center and pictured above) succinctly states, the union’s Club Report Cards are not to be mistaken as a shame stick or as a bottomless pit of grievance. Wink wink. Instead, the Report Cards are intended to provide a candid, real-time and realistic portrait of the NFL workplace spread over nearly a dozen key indicators including Food/Cafeteria, Locker Room, Treatment of Families, Training Staff, Team Travel, Head Coach and Ownership among others. The marks are meant to highlight best practices and standards, identify room for improvement, educate union membership and to inform substantive action. Queue the cynic who would ask why the buzzy public referendum. Nevertheless, the Report Cards are submitted digitally to all players who are granted anonymity in exchange for honest feedback. Last year, the NFLPA received a 60% response rate; this year, the participation rate swelled to 77% (1314 out of 1706 active players) as the survey took on a popular life of its own as voice with atmospheric reach and operatic resonance.

At the conclusion of the 2022 season, players for the Jacksonville Jaguars legendarily declared an infestation of rats within their locker room and grimacingly described the NYC-sized rodents hopping in and out of clean and dirty laundry hampers alike with reckless abound and the zeal of a team with an unbeaten record (which the Jags certainly were not). A D- resulted which makes one think what exactly qualifies as an F. Nonetheless, as a result of the ridicule AND a new practice facility, the rats disappeared and this past February, that D- catapulted to an A-. Commanders athletes in Washington, for their part, griped of sewage leaks resulting in standing unspeakable effluent puddles in the locker room and showers lacking both hot water and pressure; you know the kinds the key ingredients WHEN taking a shower. Food was another consistent pain point. Take the Cardinals for instance. Last year, players lampooned Ownership for charging players for boxed dinners via payroll deduction. If you’re hungry as a player working out at the team facility after the season is over, you’ll see yet another payroll deduction for that banana you consumed pre-workout. The Cards eliminated the food surcharge after the embarrassment went viral. IN the area of travel, the Commanders make another inauspicious appearance two years running where players complained of having to room with teammates when on the road, one of only seven teams to adhere to such a policy. Tampa Bay is another such Team that pairs you with a roommate in your hotel room. Want a single room? That’ll cost you $1750 for the season. For the Titans, plane travel surfaced as an irritant as players are consistently relegated to basic coach, far beyond Economy Plus, while team staff enjoy the extravagancies of First Class on the very same flight. Insulting and infuriating were words that populated in the report card’s word cloud. As for the Chargers, an F in the Treatment of Families reflects a $75 per child daily fee ($50 for each additional child per family) and the fact that daycare is not actually onsite but instead across a busy six lane thoroughfare. In their defense, the team declares that a new practice facility that debuted this past Summer ought to remedy many of the old facility’s wrongs including the cafeteria’s dead last (#32) ranking in food taste and freshness. The childcare venue is now onsite but is still subject to a daily fee. Progress, however glacial, I suppose.

Over in Cincinnati, the Bengals bemoaned the availability of just five toilets for a 53 member team. And that’s when they’re in service. Half the showers don’t work and for those that do, weak-willed water pressure make showering a chore. Final grade for facilities: D+. The identical restroom situation presents in Atlanta where another chief complaint is the absence of ventilation and cleanliness and an abundance of roaches. Grade F. Being crowned back-to-back Super Bowl champions doesn’t make for a phoned in A+ either. The players for the Chiefs growled about consistent empty promises of much-needed facility upgrades at Arrowhead where they only received folding metal chairs with backs in the Locker Room just this year after surfacing complaints in last year’s survey. Sadly for them, the more substantive upgrades they seek are now mired in Ownership’s continued quest for public financing to fund a full-scale stadium renovation. The classic case of alligator arms. Another immediate need in KC is the Training Staff, which received a universally bad F. Players were not amused with the perennial understaffing that plagues the Training Room. And once attention is gained, players feel cheated of the necessary treatment to support recovery and performance. And forget about preventative treatment for day-to-day issues because it’s not even on the menu despite being a core offering across all other teams. In a similar vein, the Ravens famously and unanimously in 2023 graded their Training Room and regimen with an F- and attributed the team’s injury-prone season to Head Strength Coach Steve Saunders. Accusatory and prosecutorial at the same time. Lo and behold, this year Steve Saunders was let go, a new strength and condition regime was elevated, general team health improved, injury abated and B- this year resulted. The squeaky wheel as they say.

So there you have it. The 2023 Report Cards are IN and they tell a sordid tale of the logistical underbelly fans aren’t generally privy to. It’s a fun read from an outside-looking-in perspective yet at the same time certainly shouldn’t be mistaken as an ugly expose into abject, impoverished working conditions NFL players must endure. Much the opposite. Overall and very generally speaking, players are (tepidly) content with Ownership and Head Coaches. Things get very squishy the closer you get to routine day-to-day activities. And those are the types of things we can all relate to, if in an oblique way. Much to the chagrin of Owners, the NFLPA insists on splashy press releases in late February to publicize the now annual results. And much to the benefit of players league-wide, working conditions are actually improving measurably. Funny how beef works.

Turning now to Week 1 in the fresh 2024 Season, there are nearly as many early surprises of promise as there are surprises of despair. Not so much beef, but a four course meal in wonderment. Count the Panthers among the latter where on Sunday Carolina faced off against the Saints in NOLA and came away shaken. Rookie 2023 Draft first pick QB Bryce Young, already drowning in his second year, is displaying more of the same catastrophic tendencies as he did in 2023 sadly. To wit, his opening drive this weekend resulted in an INT. Yikes. A 10–47 drubbing closely followed and isn’t the type of result to inspire the teammates who surround him on either side of the ball. New coach Dave Canales will force a decision on starter that at this point seems preordained. Over in Jersey, Giants fans always anticipate a full Fall Week 1 reset and instead become stranded with four flat tires. Such was the case with their matchup with the visiting Vikings. Veteran and beleaguered and meh QB Daniel Jones flailed and flopped out of the gate (22/42 186yds 0 TDs 2 INTs) and roped in his team for 6–28 ride. Veteran, journeyman but new-to-Minnesota QB Sam Darnold played lights-out by comparison alongside RB Aaron Jones. The true test comes this weekend as SF glides into town.

Out west at SoFi, the Jim Harbaugh era with the Chargers officially began in signature Jim Harbaugh fashion complete with a W. A trusty, hardened ground game without the need for a highlight reel worthy air game (though star QB Justin Herbert is more than capable of that) carved up the visiting Raiders while the team’s Defense smothered any semblance of a rebuttal, 22–10. LAC is back and the formidable AFC West contender they’ve wished to become since arriving in LA way back in 2017. In the Cleve, Dak Prescott sealed his new quarter billion dollar deal with a 33–17 declarative victory over the Browns. Though the true credit runs to his team’s traditional industrial-strength Defense which forced CLE, and in particular troubled Deshaun Watson, belly up. Deshaun, beset with yet another multi-million dollar lawsuit that surfaced just yesterday and to do with the same-old same-old, was booed into the locker room at halftime and will likely find out soon how deflated dream balloons descend. That’s just the hard truth for a player who showed such promise in 2020 and has since kinda, well, not.

In our first Round Robin of the season, PIT fading star QB Russell Wilson (nursing a fresh calf injury) made way for Justin Fields who then made way for an interesting victory, despite zero offensive TDs. The team’s traditional strong suit DEF rose to the occasion alongside kicker Chris Boswell who might just rise to Justin Fields heights. As to the opposing and at-home Falcons, well Kirk Cousins and Co are still sorting through the wreckage. Steel City FTW 18–10. Pats at Cinci showcased a changing of the guard in NE with Jerod Mayo taking the reins from you-know-who and doing so quite admirably. The Bengals were pushed around for four quarters by an all of a sudden disciplined and cleaner Patriots playbook. Quite the statement coming from a team burdened with a 4–13 record last year. In Seattle, Denver’s big Bo Nix experiment played out to a chorus of sad trombones (3.3 per per his 42 pass attempts, practically a million) as the Hawks look to steady their shaky footing under new HC Mike Macdonald. Finally, the Commanders visited Tampa Bay, were turned away 17–20 and by doing so lived down to WAS fan expectations and the state of their home sewage-ornamented locker room. That contention year is likely still years away. And last night, a thrilling Lions 26–20 OT victory over the already-injury and over-burdened Rams who managed an almost come-from-behind WIN with star duo Matt Stafford and Cooper Kupp. A repeat will be scheduled for January.