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 Melcher Oosterman |
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Editor’s note |
Good morning. September means back-to-school, pumpkin spice lattes, and losing your fantasy football matchup by one point because of a Derrick Henry fumble. The 2026 NFL season kicks off next Wednesday (Sept. 9), when the Seattle Seahawks and New England Patriots meet for a Super Bowl rematch. Off the field, there’s a lot going on, from the NFL’s attempt to go global, to Netflix going all-in on the sport, to scientists trying to make the game safer. We’ll get into all that and much more in today’s special edition, Football Brew. |
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Foreign turf The effort to take American football global  Sebastian Widmann/Getty Image |
The NFL is making strides towards getting Taylor Swift’s husband to match her level of international fame. NFL commissioner Roger Goodell told German media last week that he has “no doubt” that the league will someday have an internationally based team. Squads are already playing more games abroad than ever before:
- A record nine international NFL games are scheduled for the upcoming season, up from just two in 2021.
- The games will take place across four continents, with Paris and Rio De Janeiro debuting as host cities.
The league hopes that filling stadiums that typically host the other type of football will convert more foreigners into regular NFL watchers, leading to lucrative media rights deals. Where would the first non-US team be? Germany is often singled out for its sizable NFL fanbase that dates back to its postwar occupation by the US. Over 100,000 people attended two games in Frankfurt in 2023, while German Super Bowl viewership grew to 1.87 million this year from 1.55 million in 2025. Another option would be London, which has hosted the most international games in recent years and where the NFL has a strong operations foothold. Goodell previously said that the city could support not just one but two franchises. But some executives say that an international franchise in Canada or Mexico—the latter of which has ~40 million NFL fans—would make the most sense, as they’d be closer to US teams. Tackling challengesSkeptics of expansion argue that a team abroad would create logistical headaches beyond making sure Josh Allen’s passport isn’t expired. They worry that regular overseas travel could be taxing for players, and say that expansion requires the game schedule to be overhauled to give teams adequate rest. Plus, it might be hard to lure free agent players overseas. More than half of NFL players said they wouldn’t join a foreign team, according to a 2023 anonymous survey by The Athletic. There are past fumbles to learn from: A European NFL offshoot that existed from 1991 to 2007 failed to build a fandom due to teams changing cities and a lack of talent, costing the league $400 million in losses.—SK
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Sponsored By PwC AI’s stepping onto the pitch  |
How much of an edge can AI give a sports team? And how do audiences feel about it? Sports games have become as fueled by data as they are by hot dogs, jersey sales, and fans yelling at the TV. With stats driving decisions about venue and broadcast logistics both on and off the field, market insights are beginning to drive more of the elements audiences know and love. What is the potential for AI models to drive predictive accuracy further into the future, and does this introduce multiple flags on the play? The Intelligence Shift host Dan Priest speaks with Andy Tabrizi, CEO of Recentive Analytics, about how AI is transforming sports forecasting, from stadium buildouts to predicting the next great talent. Tune in. |
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Stream team Netflix wants a piece of the pigskin  Aaron M. Sprecher/Getty Images |
There will be more than just rom-coms about busy career women going back to their hometown inns on Netflix around the holidays this year. Netflix’s new four-year deal with the NFL gives the streaming platform the rights to five games this season, three more than the previous year as it goes all-in on football. In addition to two Christmas Day games, Netflix will stream the Los Angeles Rams vs. the San Francisco 49ers in Australia in September, as well as a game on Thanksgiving Eve and one January Game:
- In its previous deal, Netflix aired two games that reportedly cost the company about $75 million apiece.
- There was some concern that technical issues, like the glitches during the Jake Paul–Mike Tyson fight last November, would be a problem. But both games went off without a hitch.
Netflix and the NFL have what each other want. The NFL wants some of Netflix’s young and international audience as it tries to expand overseas. Meanwhile, Netflix sees live events as one of the best ways to court advertiser dollars, a big reason why the streaming giant also snagged the rights to WWE’s Raw.—MM
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Injury report How to build a better helmet  Scott Taetsch/Getty Images |
There’s a reason why Patrick Mahomes’s helmet looks like that. The nearly $700 piece of headgear protecting the Kansas City Chiefs star quarterback sits high atop his dome in part because of a crowning discovery from decades of testing: Distance makes the head blow softer. In other words, the more space and time between shell contact and head contact, the better—similar to car crash safety techniques. That’s why today’s helmets are bigger and less rigid than their predecessors. Inside, 3D-printed, collapsible liners compress better than foam to absorb more impact. Modern progress happened quickly:
- “We’ve seen more change in roughly the last 14 years than we probably did in the previous 40,” the director of the Virginia Tech Helmet Lab—the leading authority in football helmet safety—told the publication Science.
- When the lab started rating headgear in 2011, helmets received top marks (five stars) if they were projected to expose wearers to zero to 10 concussive hits in a season. That cutoff is now zero to 1.86 hits, reflecting how much helmet manufacturers have raised the bar.
Progress can’t come soon enough: At least one in four former NFL players developed CTE, a brain disease caused by repeated head trauma, a new study suggested last week. A New York Giants’ long snapper told Science that he feels the impact of head-to-head collisions less in newer helmets, but… Their impact on injury prevention is hard to gauge, partially because CTE can only be diagnosed post-mortem. Concussions are down 35% in the NFL since a 2017 peak, but that may also be due in part to league rule changes—including mandatory bubble-like helmet caps during practice. Plus, the league reportedly still averages 0.5 concussions per game.—ML
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Sponsored By PwC  |
AI shoots, AI scores? The Intelligence Shift host Dan Priest speaks with Andy Tabrizi, CEO of Recentive Analytics, about how AI is transforming sports forecasting. Andy’s models now guide decisions worth hundreds of millions of dollars for the NFL and Live Nation. There’s a lot that can happen when AI enters the pitch. Listen in. |
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Explain it to the group chat College football: Where geography means nothing  Dustin Markland/Getty Images |
College football conferences—once loosely organized by location, among other things—have increasingly been ignoring the map in favor of a truer north: cold hard cash. Conferences are competing to add teams from all over the country, because bigger and better fan bases means bigger and better TV contracts. But that’s also how you end up with conference names that make less sense:
- California and Stanford are somehow in the Atlantic Coast Conference (ACC).
- The Mountain West Conference features Hawaii and Northern Illinois.
- The Big 12 has 16 schools in it, and the Big Ten has 18.
All that shuffling breeds fan confusion, and can be devastating for a conference if they fall behind in the arms race. When the Pac-12 lost 10 teams in the great realignment of 2024, its TV rights fees dropped from $381 million a year to just $3 million, according to USA Today. What’s next? A conference like the ACC, with its inferior TV deal, could face similar setbacks if its marquee teams try to chase bigger money in the SEC and Big Ten.—BC |
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History lesson How fantasy football became a reality  Randy Shropshire/Getty Images |
In the early 1960s, Bill “Wink” Winkenbach, part-owner of the then-Oakland Raiders, loved football so much that he invented a way to also own a fake team. It sparked a fantasy football revolution, and now we all have to spend the fall months researching quarterback bye weeks. Raiders of the lost art: In 1962, Winkenbach, Raiders publicist Bill Tunnell, and local sports reporter Scotty Stirling came up with rules for the first fantasy football league:
- Certain positions would be drafted, including two kickers and two fullbacks.
- Point values would be assigned for different on-field accomplishments (field goals were worth as much as offensive touchdowns).
- Results would be painstakingly gathered via local newspapers’ box scores.
The following year, the Greater Oakland Professional Pigskin Prognosticators League (GOPPPL) officially held its first draft. The top pick was Houston Oilers quarterback/kicker George Blanda, per RotoWire. Now, the internet has helped turn fantasy football into a multi-billion-dollar industry, with tens of millions of participants and some of the worst team name puns you’ve ever heard.—BC |
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News you can use The best football movies and TV shows  Frederick M. Brown/Getty Images |
The pigskin is no stranger to screens big and small. Here are some movies and TV shows (there are a lot, so apologies if yours isn’t here) starring America’s most popular sport: Friday Night Lights: It’s the book that became a movie that became a TV show that launched Kyle Chandler to stardom. It also inspired a great sketch from Amy Schumer. Remember The Titans: Coach Boone brought the high school a state title by making football not fun for his players. In 2023, Hayden Panettiere called it her “favorite movie to film.” The Blind Side: The movie that won Sandra Bullock an Oscar has a different feel after Michael Oher sued the real-life family portrayed as the selfless heroes. Rudy: It’s about a guy who could’ve started on a smaller school’s team but gave it up to make one good play. To this day, it’s revered by Notre Dame fans and all men under 5-foot-7. Varsity Blues: It’s the Texas high school football movie that walked so Friday Night Lights could run. It also led to a parody storyline in Not Another Teen Movie. Playmakers: This was a 2003 fictional television drama from ESPN about the darker side of pro football. It lasted only one season due to pressure from the NFL to cancel it. Draft Day: Perhaps the most fantastical of all football movies, it’s the tale of a fictional Cleveland Browns general manager who believes he’s created a championship team by drafting a middle linebacker first overall and trading for a punt returner.—DL |
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