Walkthrough: Sloppy Rematches, Silly Rivalries and Sweet Revenge
The Eagles are 2-0. The Chiefs are 0-2. The Lions are back. Joe Burrow is injured. Please overreact to all of these developments accordingly.
In this Week 2 edition of Walkthrough …
The Chiefs fall to 0-2 with a loss to the Eagles in the Super Bowl rematch; Old Takes Exposed will be roasting the entirety of the NFL media come January.
Joe Burrow suffers a toe injury; the Jacksonville Jaguars respond by not just looking a gift horse in the mouth but giving it a full orthodontic exam.
The Detroit Lions ruin Ben Johnson’s homecoming by reminding him that he now coaches the Chicago Bears.
Sunday night’s Falcons-Vikings matchup features the ultimate twist ending: no twist ending at all.
And much more! Let’s start by trying to make some sense of the madness of Week 2. Then we’ll focus on a bunch of specific games.
Rivalries, Rematches and Revenge
Are the Eagles and Chiefs “rivals”?
They have split two of the last three Super Bowls. That seems rivalry-ish. They share all sorts of history: Andy Reid, coaches like Dick Vermeil and Herm Edwards before him, the Kelce Brothers. Eagles-versus-Chiefs, indisputably a Super Bowl rematch, still carries vestiges of a sibling rivalry, which is the oldest and fiercest (see: page 6 or so of your typical Bible) type of rivalry.
Yet I walked these East Philly streets last week and rarely heard scorn or animosity hurled at the Chiefs, even though scorn-hurling is the local pastime. National fans are more likely than Eagles fans to grumble and grouse about the Chiefs’ WWE-like effect on referees and celebrity paramours. My neighbors were too busy diagramming hypothetical flight trajectories of Dak Prescott’s saliva all week to worry too much about the Chiefs.
As for the Chiefs fan’s perspective, some educated guesses: the Broncos and Raiders remain bitter generational rivals; the Bills are the tractor-trailer forever in the rearview mirror; and success/expectations/attrition/scrutiny themselves have become the team’s most hated adversaries.
The 20-17 Eagles victory over the Chiefs was therefore, in many ways, as small as Big Super Bowl rematches come.
Sure, far too much will be said this week about the possible collapse of the Chiefs dynasty. But the same things would be said – and would mean much more, from a tiebreakers-and-odds standpoint – if some AFC middleweight like the Steelers beat them.
The Eagles are now 2-0, but my Facebook friends will find much to fret about, from the anemic passing attack to the gaping hole at #2 cornerback to the Green Bay Packers. Beating the Chiefs offers little extra validation. By contrast, losing to the Cowboys in Week 1 would have been perceived as catastrophic. (Eagles-Chiefs will get a full Game Spotlight in a few paragraphs.)
The Super Bowl rematch wasn’t even the most exciting game in the late-afternoon window. That distinction went, somehow, to the 29-28 Colts victory over the Broncos, which ended with a lifetime supply of weird field goal shenanigans.
That game, unfortunately, will NOT be spotlighted in this edition of Walkthrough – there are so many hours in a Sunday night – and I refuse to dignify the 2-0 Colts with any “Are They For Real?” speculation, because they emphatically are not.
The Lions-Bears showdown appeared, on paper, to be far juicier than Eagles-Chiefs, in large part because Ben Johnson has become one of the central characters of the 2025 NFL season. The 52-21 Lions victory turned out to be uncompetitive by late in the second quarter (a Game Spotlight is coming later in Walkthrough), but at least Johnson will no longer be spoken of in hushed tones as some sorcerer capable of tearing down or rebuilding franchises with a muttered mystical incantations about the eldritch power of a high completion percentage.
The stretchiest of rivalry storylines from Week 2 centered upon Joe Flacco’s return to Baltimore. Flacco has faced the Ravens before, in a 24-9 loss as the Jets starter in Week 1 of 2022, but he has never started a homecoming game during the post-Ravens infinite-scroll stage of his career.
Any Ravens fan enmity toward Flacco for his half-decade of overcompensated mediocrity has long subsided. Kyle Goon of the Baltimore Banner even wrote last week that Flacco’s final gift to the Ravens and Baltimore was the “drama-free handoff” to Lamar Jackson.
“He’s iconic, I think, in Baltimore football history,” said John Harbaugh of Flacco. A succinct summation of a player and an era: one need not be “elite” to be “iconic.” Flacco is less of a rival for the Ravens than a nutty gruncle who shows up at a holiday dinner for the first time in years with his latest on-and-off girlfriend in tow. And boy is she a piece of work.
Sunday’s slow-motion 41-17 Ravens runaway gained a dollop of extra pregame flavor when reports surfaced that the Ravens planned to select Shedeur Sanders in the fifth round of April’s draft, then balked when they heard the freefalling prospect did not want to play for them. The Sanders family could have saved a lot of time and intrigue by giving teams and the media a list of teams Shedeur was willing to play for.
Gawking at Sanders’ pre-draft insolence never gets old. But when the Ravens finally overcame another Derrick Henry fumble (that’s a troubling new habit), a dropped-interception-turned-Browns-touchdown and other probability-defying Stupid Ravens Tricks to finally mount an insurmountable lead, it was Dillon Gabriel who replaced Flacco.
Sanders, like W.C. Fields, should have been suspicious of joining the sort of club that would accept him as a member.