Identity crisis
Happy Thursday! There’s just a few more days left now in the last full sports week before October, so get ready for the action to heat up. Week 3 of the NFL kicks off tonight with a matchup between two teams we still don’t quite know what to make of — the Packers and Falcons — so we’ll dig into why they’re emblematic of an NFL season that’s been especially hard to read. Plus, Team USA begins another heavily-favored run at the Presidents Cup, while the last few MLB playoff races keep stumbling toward their finish line. (There’s now an 85% chance the AL West champ has the worst record of any division winner ever.) Oh, and the WNBA wraps up its regular season tonight. Here’s what we’re watching today:
The Main Events
All listed times are Eastern. 🚨= Elimination game
Football:
🏈 NFL: Falcons (30%) at Packers (70%) - 8:15 p.m. (Prime Video)
🏈🏆 Super Bowl check-in: Bills 13% to win NFL title🏈 CFB: Liberty (56%) at Coastal Carolina (44%) - 7:30 p.m. (ESPN2)
🏈🏆 College Football Playoff check-in: UGA/Ohio State/Texas 15% to win national title - Dawgs have entered the chat!
MLB:
⚾ D-Backs (64%) at Rockies (36%) - 3:10 p.m. (MLB.tv) - Arizona continuing improbable playoff chase
⚾ Brewers (47%) at Phillies (53%) - 6:05 p.m. (MLB.tv)
⚾ Rays (42%) at Yankees (58%) - 7:05 p.m. (YES/MLB.tv)
⚾ Padres (38%) at Dodgers (62%) - 10:10 p.m. (MLB Network/SportsNet LA)
⚾🏆 World Series title check-in: Dodgers 32% to win
WNBA:
🏀 Fever (60%) at Lynx (40%) - 8 p.m. (USA Network)
🏀 Aces (80%) at Mercury (20%) - 10 p.m. (USA Network)
🏀🏆 WNBA title check-in: Lynx 42% to win
Soccer:
⚽ UEFA Nations League: Netherlands (37%) vs. Germany (39%) - 2:45 p.m. (FS1/ViX)
⚽🏆 Champions League title check-in: FC Barcelona 28% to win⚽🏆 Premier League title check-in: Arsenal FC 49% to win⚽🏆 MLS title check-in: Vancouver Whitecaps FC 24% to win MLS Cup⚽🏆 NWSL title check-in: Gotham FC 28% to win
Golf:
⛳ Presidents Cup (Medinah Country Club) - Round 1 Foursomes/Four-Ball - 1 p.m. (Golf Channel/Peacock) - Team USA 84% to win
What are any of these teams?
Week 3 of the 2026 NFL season is already upon us tonight, as the Green Bay Packers host the Atlanta Falcons on Thursday Night Football. It’s always a weird moment in the season, because we have more data than we did when making our breathless Week 1 overreactions — every team has now played twice, so you can not only look at who a team has played, but judge them against who they played, and so forth. But still, 2 games is not really much of a sample to draw from… and this year’s 2-game sample is stranger than most.
For one thing, we had a bizarre whiplash between many teams’ results from Week 1 to Week 2. We can quantify this by simply looking at how much a team’s point differential swung between the weeks — i.e., a team that went from winning by 10 to losing by 10 would have 20 points of “whiplash” — and 2026 saw an average whiplash of 18.0 points per team between Weeks 1-2, 10th-highest of any season since the 1970 AFL merger, with the co-third-highest median whiplash (17 points) out of that sample:
Then we get to the real elephant in the room: Quarterback injuries. As we noted the other day, 5 different NFL teams are set to have a different starting QB in Week 3 than they did in Week 1, which is a fairly high amount of turnover under center to begin a season. That includes the defending champion Seahawks (Sam Darnold → Drew Lock), the Commanders (Jayden Daniels → Marcus Mariota), the Giants (Jaxson Dart → Jameis Winston), the Bears — who are actually potentially down TWO QBs (Caleb Williams → Tyson Bagent → Case Keenum) — and one of tonight’s teams, the Falcons (who’ve gone Tua Tagovailoa → Cooper Rush → Michael Penix Jr.).
Penix was the No. 8 pick in the 2024 draft and has played at an above-average level when healthy… the problem being that he’s only been able to start 12 games in his 2+ seasons of NFL action, suffering a torn ACL last season that he’s only now coming back from. That makes him a true wild-card for a Falcons team that has been absolutely atrocious — they have the NFL’s worst point differential, being outscored by an embarrassing margin of 54-16 with journeyman Cooper Rush pressed into action these past few weeks. If Penix is less terrible, maybe Atlanta can be more middle-of-the-road like they were last year, rather than a complete and utter trainwreck.
And then you have the Packers, who went into the season with at least some designs on being a real contender, but who’ve been almost completely uninspiring ever since taking a 22-10 lead over Minnesota with 5 minutes left in the third quarter of Week 1. Green Bay would go on to allow 29 (!) unanswered points to a team quarterbacked by Carson Wentz, then turned around and needed a 10-point fourth-quarter comeback to force OT and beat the Jets last week.
The Packers were on the road for both of those games, and now they’ll be hosting at Lambeau Field for the first time this season. But QB Jordan Love was below-average by Expected Points Added (EPA) in both contests, and he’s inexplicably been one of the league’s worst QBs (non-Cooper Rush division) to start the season, following an MVP-candidate performance a year ago in which he helped carry an otherwise lacking Green Bay squad to the playoffs. Against what’s projected to be a subpar Falcons defense, it would be nice to see Love actually perform at the level we’re accustomed to seeing.
In this battle of confusing teams, the Packers are around 70% prediction market favorites over the Falcons, but games like these are the strange connective tissue of the NFL season — when two teams that we haven’t been able to get a handle on give us at least some information about their relative quality, it filters across the rest of the league as a set of measuring sticks that we can benchmark everyone else against… until the whole thing gets scrambled all over again with more head-scratching results this weekend.
America’s Cup
Golf’s Presidents Cup begins play today at Medinah Country Club in Medinah, Illinois, just outside Chicago, and with it comes another chance for America to stomp its (non-European) competition — or for the International team to pull off an upset for the ages. For those who may not know, the Presidents Cup is an off-cycle version of the Ryder Cup, except instead of pitting America’s top players against the best Europe has to offer, this one gathers the best non-European players to face the Americans. And unlike the Ryder Cup, which Team USA usually loses to Team Europe in recent years — Europe has won 11 of 15 events since 1995, including 6 of the past 8 — the Americans tend to dominate the rest of the world, which explains why they’re heavy 84% prediction market favorites again this year. The US is riding a 10-event win streak at the Presidents Cup (going back to a tie in 2003) and has only lost the event once (1998) in its 15-installment history. With 10 of the Top 11 Data Golf-ranked players at the event, the US should win again… but hey, that’s why they play the matches.
What else we’re reading
Smart, short reads we liked while building today’s odds.
🏈 “3 Keys to Winning an NFL Game” by Troy Chapman
🏈 “Is Herbert Washed?” by Judah Fortgang
🎾 “The complicated afterlife of a WAG-centric brand” by Jessica Schiffer
🏈 “CFB teams that are just really fun” by Brendan Farrell
🏈 “Do NFL Teams Beat the Heat?” by Ray Carpenter
Next on deck…
Friday (9/25)
🏈 CFB: Clemson at Cal
⚾ MLB: Dodgers at Giants
⚾ MLB: Orioles at Yankees
🏀 WNBA: No games. (Off day before playoffs start Sunday, 9/27)
⚽ UEFA Nations League: Italy vs. Belgium
⛳ Golf: Presidents Cup - Round 2 (Medinah Country Club)
Saturday (9/26)
🏈 CFB: Texas at Tennessee
🏈 CFB: Iowa at Michigan
⚾ MLB: Rays at Phillies - 2008 World Series rematch :-)
🏀 WNBA: No games. (Off day before playoffs start Sunday, 9/27)
⚽ Soccer: USMNT vs. Peru
🏁 F1: Azerbaijan Grand Prix (Baku City Circuit)
⛳ Golf: Presidents Cup - Rounds 3/4 (Medinah Country Club)
🥊 UFC Fight Night: Rosas Jr. vs. Barcelos
Sunday (9/27)
🏈 NFL: Ravens at Cowboys
🏈 NFL: Chiefs at Dolphins
🏈 NFL: Rams at Broncos
⚾ MLB: Dodgers at Giants
🏀 WNBA Playoffs begin! 🏆
⚽ MLS: Columbus Crew vs. Inter Miami CF
⛳ Golf: Presidents Cup - Final Day / Singles Matches (Medinah Country Club)
🏁 NASCAR: Hollywood Casino 400 at Kansas Speedway
