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Welcome to The First Read, which will serve as the Monday Morning recap during the NFL season. The format might change throughout the year, but for now we’ll focus on a few big and small things each week. It was a wild first full day of the NFL season. Let’s get to it.

Bills-Texans was one of the most anticipated matchups of the season’s opening week. In the 2026 FTN Almanac, these were the two AFC teams with the highest projected win totals and odds to win the Super Bowl. While what we saw from the Buffalo defense (eh!) and Houston offense (still pretty good!) might matter more for the long-term ceiling for these two teams, the matchup on the other side of the ball created an early-season best vs. best clash that everyone should have been excited about… except maybe Josh Allen.

Over the past two regular seasons, Allen ranked first among quarterbacks in EPA per play and sixth in success rate. His meetings with the Texans were not as favorable. He played against Houston in each of the past two regular seasons and those games had two of Allen’s three lowest success rates in that span.

Those two games didn’t play out the same way and there was no one thing the Bills could point to as something to avoid in this meeting. In the 2024 game, Allen went 9-of-30 but still finished with positive EPA because he was able to run around and avoid sacks. However, nothing good happened when he did throw the ball. Allen had a 28.9% inaccurate throw rate — his highest in these two years and only game over 18% — and a third of his completions failed to produce positive EPA.

Last season, the escapability didn’t work. The Bills tried to prepare for Houston’s pass rush as 61.8% of Allen’s pass attempts came under 2.5 seconds (his second-highest rate over the past two seasons), but he was still pressured on 44% of his dropbacks and sacked eight times. While Allen completed 70.6% of his passes, 45.5% of his completions did not have positive EPA.

In Week 1, Allen had little trouble against the Houston defense. The Bills came away with a 36-31 win and it’s how the offense looked and operated that should make fans in Buffalo feel good about the 2026 season. 

Allen had a passing triple-double against Houston, hitting double digits in aDOT, air yards per completion, and yards per attempt. The Bills varied the ways they attacked the Texans defense, mixing personnel and formations.

The Bills were in 13 personnel on a league-high 40.9% of their plays in Week 1. Buffalo used that as a way to keep the ground game efficient — they had just a 28.9% pass rate with three tight ends on the field. Houston matched Buffalo’s 13 with nickel personnel on 81% of snaps. The Bills used the size advantage to keep the ball moving in the ground game, though Buffalo only had a 33.3% success rate on runs from 13 against Houston’s nickel. Still, the Bills did just enough to keep those tight ends on the field, which opened up two big passing plays.

Allen had a 38-yard throw to Dalton Kincaid just before the two-minute warning in the first half that helped set up a 43-yard touchdown pass to D.J. Moore.

Then at the two-minute warning, Allen found Kincaid on a crossing route for 35 yards that put the Bills inside the 40-yard line on their final drive.

It’s not as if Houston was hopeless. The Texans pressured Allen on 31.3% of his dropbacks while only blitzing 15.6% of the time. But when pressured, Allen went 4-of-8 for 16.3 yards per attempt and 0.50 EPA per play. Three of those completions were the above 38-yard throw to Kincaid, another 40-yard pass to Kincaid, and the go-ahead touchdown to Josh Palmer.

The Bills averaged 0.28 EPA per play, the high mark for a team against a DeMeco Ryans-led Texans defense.

The aggressiveness is what I’m clinging to here as an observer of the Bills going forward. Last year, Allen ranked 25th in aDOT and 24th in air yards per completion among 28 quarterbacks with at least 200 dropbacks. It was an efficient way for the Bills to manage the game, especially with a successful running game. But this is Josh freaking Allen. No ideal offense with Allen at the helm should have him in the bottom third of aDOT league-wide.

With Joe Brady promoted from offensive coordinator to head coach, this was a good test to see what adjustments and problem-solving could be in play to open the season. Brady also stayed aggressive late in the game when the Bills got into field goal range while they trailed by one. Instead of playing it safe, Buffalo threw twice — once almost resulting in a game-ending interception — and it won them the game at the end. 

Cool quarterbacks doing cool things. That can make a game or a whole week fun. We got a few of those in the opening week, but we're going to focus on Caleb Williams and Trevor Lawrence.

Williams went 21-of-29 for 265 yards and two passing touchdowns to go along with two other scores on the ground. He averaged 0.37 EPA per play, better than all but one of his 2025 starts under Ben Johnson (0.58, Week 3 vs Dallas).

Just about everything the Bears would have wanted to see from Williams in his second year in this offense was on display against the Panthers. Williams had a high completion percentage while also throwing the ball downfield and creating explosives. 

It was the best of all worlds. Williams was able to hold onto the ball to escape pressure and those plays were generally positive. On 21 dropbacks of three of more seconds, Williams averaged 0.61 EPA per play with a 52.4% success rate. Last season, he averaged 0.00 EPA per play and a 38.2% success rate on dropbacks extended three or more seconds.

Williams also peppered the middle of the field, an area where the Bears were able to do a ton of damage in rhythm.

All of this was also done as Williams spread the ball around. Kalif Raymond led the Bears in target share while Colston Loveland didn’t have a catch on two targets. Chicago scored 59 points, which is a good start to Ben Johnson’s goal of breaking the points record. 

There might need to be massive opponent adjustments for the Browns this season, but Trevor Lawrence lit them up, going 18-of-23 with 0.65 EPA per play and a 69.2% success rate. Some of Lawrence’s throws were outrageous in this game.

Lawrence made every throw count. He was only inaccurate on 8.7% of throws and just 5.4% of his completions failed to produce positive EPA. He lived in the intermediate area of the field, where 39.1% of his passes traveled between 11-19 air yards. He also completed the Allen triple-double of air yards per attempt, air yards per completion, and yards per attempt. 

The situation couldn’t have been much more ideal. Lawrence used play-action on 42% of his dropbacks and 72% of his dropbacks came from a clean pocket. Still, Lawrence picking apart a defense with such control and precision is an incredible sign for the evolution of this offense under Liam Coen.

Jacksonville travels to Denver next week, so the degree of difficulty should jump a bit but there was a lot to like about the Jaguars’ performance in Week 1.

One of the biggest talking points around the league is the increase in under center coming to many offenses, both new and established. Under center rates have slowly crept up over the past few seasons, but they still came in below 40% in 2025.

The spike in 2017 came in a season when so many starting quarterbacks went down with injuries and teams across the league pivoted to hide the poor quarterback play. The switch this year is to enhance quarterback play and passing efficiency.

With defenses getting so good at disguising coverages and intentions before the snap, going back under center is the counter for offenses to limit their pre-snap tells. The back plays a big part in this. In shotgun, there are only so many run concepts a team can get to when the back is next to the quarterback. It’s a similar case with pass protection, where the defense can at least eliminate the possibility of some blocking schemes when the back is in shotgun.

After Sunday Night Football, offenses across the league were in shotgun on 56% of plays. Last season, the lowest shotgun rate in the league during a single week was 60.7% in Week 18. The rate in Week 1 last year was 69.6%. 

On early downs, the under center efficiency was better both through the air and on the ground.

For now, this doesn’t seem to be just preseason lip service. Even if some offenses pull back, we’re already starting at a massive shift compared to both where we started and ended last season.

Zay Flowers went 44 yards on an option route from the backfield. It was one of many parts of the Baltimore offense that took off under first-year offensive coordinator Declan Doyle. Flowers was moved around the formation and was targeted on 54.5% of his routes, but he left the game early with a hamstring injury. Rookie wide receiver Ja’Kobi Lane also left with a wrist injury that was diagnosed as a fracture after the game.

Jahmyr Gibbs took his first game as the unquestioned bell-cow in the Detroit run game and did not look bothered. Gibbs had a career-high 29 carries and added five catches. Even with the volume, Gibbs led all running backs with a 58.6% success rate and 24.1% of his carries went for at least 10 yards.

The Vikings blitzed Jordan Love on 76.1% of his dropbacks. That’s the fourth-highest rate in a game since 2023, Flores’s first year as the Vikings’ defensive coordinator. Flores now owns nine of the top 15 rates in that span.

It was a tale of two halves for the blitzes. Love had a 37.5% success rate against the blitz in the first half, but averaged 0.35 EPA per play thanks to a few well-timed big plays, including an 81-yard touchdown to Christian Watson. In the second half, Love handled the blitz better overall with a 52.6% success rate, but averaged -0.32 EPA per play because he was sacked three times and threw an interception.

The Jets looked like a professional offense. Geno Smith was pressured on just 23.1% of his dropbacks in his re-debut with the team. He only had one game lower than that in his lone year with the Raiders (22.2%) and that was an otherwise disaster of a game in Week 7 against the Chiefs when Smith went 10-of-16 for 67 yards. His only game lower with the Seahawks was Week 7 in 2023. 

Maybe it will take a bit ot get going, or maybe it will just be more of the same. Dallas allowed Jaxson Dart to have the highest EPA per play of the week among quarterbacks (0.70) and the Giants converted nine of 10 third downs in meaningful play — they’re officially 9-of-11, but that last third down was the final play of the game. Dallas’s -2.82 defensive EPA per drive allowed was more than a point worse than the next defense in Week 1 (fittingly, the Giants).