The Dallas Cowboys had a nice night against the Carolina Panthers. They finally christened their new stadium with its first win. It was a comfortable win too, with Jake Delhomme making 3 interceptions and getting sacked a bunch of times. The moment that clinched it was with about 4 minutes left in the 4th quarter, when one of those interceptions was returned for a touchdown. For Carolina, it was a sad day, because now they go into the bye week at 0-3. They will definitely be working on fundamentals. One of the big things is that they will probably have Steve Smith learning how to run his routes as expected, rather than changing it up too much along the way.

One of this year’s draft picks is stuck in the process of negotiating a contract. Yes, even now after the season began, Michael Crabtree is still without a contract with the 49ers. He was first upset that he wasn’t the first receiver picked in the NFL draft, but that’s where the troubles began. He wasn’t happy to be there, and he was annoyed already. Now he wants to be paid a surprising amount and the 49ers either don’t have that money or aren’t willing to pay that money right now for a guy who hasn’t yet proven himself. Maybe it would be good to give him a smaller contract the first year and then it would increase in a subsequent year if he hit certain benchmarks. Either way, he’s missing out on playing, the team is missing out on having him play and no money is changing hands except for the lawyers and agents. Hopefully they solve this quickly! But they aren’t in much of a hurry, since the team is fairly successful without him thusfar.

The Pittsburgh Steelers had a tough time yesterday afternoon out in Chicago. They played decently, but they didn’t make it all the way. While they scored 14 points against the Bears, who are somewhat shorthanded in the defense, they were unable to make big stops against Jay Cutler. Cutler didn’t throw interceptions like he did in Week 1. He had been an interception machine that day, but he seems to be back on top of things. The Bears defense made the kinds of stops that they need to when things get really warm. The Steelers missed several field goal attempts at the end of the game and then Robbie Gould hit the final field goal for the Bears. Big day for Chicago, knocking down the defending Super Bowl champs!

The New York Jets are in the doghouse and the NFL will take notice. The Jets got in trouble for last year’s difficulties with their quarterback and his injuries at the end of last year. He was apparently injured for much of last season, but they left it out of their weekly injury reports for awhile. This is the problem. It would have been good for them to pay closer attention to the rules. It’s not yet clear whether it’s because Favre lied about it, or wasn’t completely forthright, or if the team was suppressing the information. Nothing it out of the question, especially with a team that was in the playoff hunt at the time. It’ll be good for all these people to get back to work. But the fines are as follows: the Jets pay 75,000 USD, head coach Mangini and GM Tannenbaum will each pay 25,000. At least they admit their error and it’s going to be ok.

In last night’s game against their divisional rival Buffalo Bills, the Patriots looked rather hesitant and uninteresting. They weren’t the type of team that we expected to see, with explosive offense and a dominating defense. But then the fourth quarter happened. Or more specifically, the last 2 minutes happened. Tom Brady jumped back into the game with all two feet, knees intact and everything. He had made it. He threw two touchdowns in the last 2:10 and got a two point conversion to boot. This gave his team a 25-24 win over the other team. This should start an impressive season for them and throws some questions on the table as to whether the Bills will be able to live up to a lot of the hype that has been going around over the last couple months. The result, either way, is New England at 1-0 from Monday Night Football action to start their next season.

When the NFL comes into the fore in the fall, people watch with rapt attention. This year has been getting better and better. It’s also going to be a big year for them as time moves forwards. We played the first game last night between the Steelers and the Titans. It was exciting and went all the way into overtime. Roethlisberger is on his way back towards the playoffs, it seems, and the Steelers’ defense seems to be back at the top of their game. They were able to hold the Titans down to just 10 points over the course of the evening, and almost got the shutout. As usual, Roethlisberger rose up to the occasion in overtime and it was exciting for everyone to see!

The Cleveland Browns have decided to do something weird. For the season opener against the Minnesota Vikings this Sunday, Eric Mangini has decided to keep it secret who his starting QB will be. No one seems to know who won the preseason competition between Brady Quinn and Derek Anderson, though it’s being reported that they know that internally. It’s going to be interesting to see what happens with this team this year. They lost one of their big receivers this time. But they also don’t have much of a big name QB. Although they were close to making the playoffs a couple years ago, it seems to have gotten worse over the last couple of years, due to unexciting draft choices and losses to free agency. We’ll just have to watch and see now and we’ll all be surprised by their new QB on Sunday, since we don’t even know who it is.

Matthew Stafford will get the first shot at taking the Lions out of the perma-losing standings. He has been green-lighted for the first week of play this year and it will be exciting to see where it ends up at. His competitor, as you probably know, is Daunte Culpepper, but the team decided to go with their newest number one draft pick who might lead them back into contention. It’s a good question where the team will end up at when they get going, because they are in a very difficult division, the NFC North (NFC Norris, as some might call it), but their goal is probably to have a decent season. They will be playing some tough people, but it can’t really get worse than last year was, can it?

Last week a bunch of stories came out about the Minnesota Vikings locker room right now as we head into the beginning of the season. It’s hard to tell if stories are simply because there was one story and then everyone else picked it up or if the volume means that it’s been confirmed several times over. But the story itself says that the Vikings might be having some issues with their team spirit because of Brett Favre coming in and taking over the QB position after not spending time in training camp for all these weeks. It’s not hard to imagine that there are several members of the team that are feeling left out. For one, Sage Rosenfels, who was released by the team after Favre was signed. But it’s easy for them to be upset that Favre hasn’t worked with the team and just kind of jumps onto the team out of nowhere. To be fair, the team and many of its individual members have stated that the stories weren’t true. We’ll see as the season wears on if that’s true or not.