You may have already read my review of NFL Gameday (the board game; not the old PlayStation video game). While I was looking up information about that game, I stumbled upon another, slightly older, football board game called 1st & Goal. This was an un-licensed football board game from a small publisher of family-friendly games. It looked incredibly similar to NFL Gameday, except that it seemed to involve more detailed football strategy and actual dice that added randomness to the final outcome of plays.

This looked like a huge upgrade over NFL Gameday's over-simplistic, rock-paper-scissors strategy. I went online trying to find out where I can buy this game, but I didn't find it listed for sale anywhere. It wasn't listed as being in-stock at my local board games' websites, and I had never seen it on the shelves at any of those stores. Believe me, if I had seen a football board game, I would have noticed! It was out of stock on Amazon (but has apparently since come back in stock!), and it wasn't available from any of the online retailers that I commonly buy board games from.

But one online retailer had a 2nd-hand game shop that listed 1 copy in "near mint" condition. So I gambled and bought it. Thankfully, it showed up in great shape, with all the components! In fact, it even included some expansion content that I didn't have to pay for. So I got a bargain!

I was imagining making my own football board game before I knew these games existed.

Upon receiving the game and flipping through the rulebook, my first reaction was "where has this game been all my life?!" Seriously, how did this game exist for 15 years without me hearing about it? One of the reasons that I bought NFL Gameday was that I had actually been mulling the idea for Kickstarting a football board game in my head that would have worked very similar. However, NFL Gameday was actually a much simpler version of what I had envisioned. But when I saw 1st & Goal, it was almost exactly what I had imagined for my own football board game.

So, hooray! My dream football board game already exists, and I can play it!

But also, boo! Somebody else beat me to it...

But, I do have some nitpicks with this game, so maybe there's room for me to come up with some revisions and improvements. And given how hard this game was to find, and that very few people seem to know it exists, there might be plenty of room for a competing board game. So maybe I should start that Kickstarter after all...

For a few months in 2025, I had started thinking about making my own football board game. I was even thinking of maybe trying my hand at a Kickstarter.

I was envisioning a game board modeled after a football field, with a little football token and a little 1st down marker. The 2 players would play competing cards against each other that represented play calls, and then roll dice to determine the outcome of the play. I hadn't quite figured out how the length of a game would be determined, or the specifics of how the different play cards would play off of each other. I also had vague visions of a team-building aspect in which each player could draft a selection of "star" players on the team, who could be optionally invoked at specific times to swing a play in that team's favor.

It was all very early and conceptual.

But as far as I knew, there weren't any football board games on the market. Oh sure, there were football-themed skins of legacy board games. You know, NFL Monopoly (or the more generic NFL-Opoly), NFL-themed chess and checkers sets, and stuff like that. But I wasn't aware of any board games that were about modeling or simulating the sport of football. Well, not entirely. I did have an old VHS-based football board game, and I remember playing a pen-and-paper football game with a family friend when I was young. And of course, I was aware of Blood Bowl. But there weren't any "real", modern football board games, that I knew of. At least, I had never seen one on the shelves of any board game stores I had ever visited.

So imagine my surprise, when I was holiday shopping at Target, and I saw this game, NFL Gameday on the shelf!

I was contemplating making my own football board game before I knew these games existed.

I looked at the back of the box, and the board looked almost exactly like what I had envisioned for my hypothetical football board game. The ball and 1st down marker are even magnetic to prevent them from accidentally shifting too much during play! That's a good idea that I hadn't come up with! And low and behold, the players are playing opposing offensive and defensive play cards against each other. This looked like a simple, and possibly even more elegant version of what I was dreaming in my head. Someone had already beaten me to it.

But, as I read the rules, I realized that this game was far simpler than what I would want from a football board game. So maybe my dream game didn't quite exist yet? Or maybe it does, because while researching information about this game, I stumbled onto another game that I had never heard of before, called 1st & Goal (review coming soon!). And that game, looked like a more sophisticated version of NFL Gameday, and closer to my vision of a hypothetical dream football game.

I just had to play this game, and also try to track down a copy of 1st & Goal to see if a football board game would actually work.

The first 2 weeks of the NFL season have not gone the way that Bears fans hoped and expected it would. The Bears have looked like an absolute dumpster fire on both offense and defense, despite a number of seemingly brilliant roster upgrades by General Manager Ryan Pace over the offseason.

Not only are the Bears looking bad, but the Green Bay Packers (without Aaron Rodgers) are looking like they could still be the team to beat in the division. 2023 was supposed to be a rebuilding season for the Packers, and the Lions' chance to shine for once. And maybe the Bears could have potentially played spoiler or snuck into a wild card playoff spot. But no, it looks like the NFC North will come down to Detroit and Green Bay, while the Bears will probably go back to hibernating in the basement.

Many pundits are quick to blame Justin Fields, and to insist that he will likely be replaced by the end of the season. But I'm not so sure that Fields is the problem. Yes, Fields does have plenty of blame. He is looking like he's slow to process the defenses, and he is flat-out ignoring open targets down the field. Those are problems that are almost entirely on Justin Fields.

But I don't think that Matt Eberflus' coaching and Luke Getsy's play design are doing Fields any favors. In fact, the play design and play selection seem to be actively making Justin Fields' job harder than it needs to be.

I am horribly confused and frustrated by the play designs that Matt Eberflus and Luke Getsy are creating.

I felt confused by a lot of the Bears' offensive play calls when I was watching the live games. But the live action is so fast, and the replays don't always show what I need to see. So thankfully, J.T. O'Sullivan has done full breakdowns of both of the Bears' first 2 games, which really helped to reassure me that yes, these play designs are as bad as they looked to me in live action. In fact, they might actually be worse!

Here we go again. The NFL is modifying its overtime rules. Now, both teams will have an opportunity to possess the ball in overtime. Even if the winner of the coin toss scores a touchdown on the opening drive of overtime, they will still have to kick off to the other team, who will now have an opportunity to match with a touchdown of their own, or potentially win the game if they convert a 2-point conversion.

The rule change is in response to the Chiefs' victory over the Bills in last season's AFC Divisional Playoff. If you recall, the 4th quarter of that game was a shootout with 5 lead-changes. The Bills scored what should have been the game-winning touchdown with 13 seconds left in regulation. The Chiefs then gained 44 yards in 2 plays and kicked a game-tying 49-yard field goal to trigger overtime. The Chiefs received the opening kickoff, drove down the field, and scored a game-winning touchdown against the exhausted Bills' defense. The Bills never got to possess the ball in overtime because, according to the old rule, if the opening drive results in a touchdown, the game ends.

Photo Credit: William Purnell/Icon Sportswire

The Chiefs beat the Bills in overtime of the 2022 AFC Divisional Playoff.

Fans have complained about NFL overtime rules for a very long time. The common complaint is that the winner of the game often comes down to a coin toss. But this is only partially true. In fact, in the regular season, the winning percentage of the team receiving the overtime kickoff is only barely more than 50% (86-67-10). This percentage changes to over 90% (10-1) in the playoffs (since the current hybrid sudden death rule went into effect). The disparity probably results from playoff teams being generally better and having better offenses.

So what else can be done to change the rules? I've already expressed my distaste for proposals to implement college overtime rules. I'm not going to rehash that here, since that isn't what the NFL is doing. Other proposals include making overtime an extension of the 4th quarter, which just gives an overwhelming advantage to the team who possesses the ball at the end of the 4th quarter, and removes any pressure for that team to execute in the final minute or so. Or maybe overtime should just be decided by a field goal shootout? Just take the offenses and defenses out of the equation entirely, and let the kickers decide the winner!

Really though, the NFL's new rule still doesn't solve the underlying problem: which is the coin flip. Now, if both offenses score, the game still goes into sudden death, and the team that gets the tie-breaking 3rd possession was still determined by the coin toss. In that Chiefs vs Bills Divisional Playoff game, even if the Bills had scored a TD to match the Chiefs in overtime, the Chiefs would still get the ball next, and it would be sudden death. The Chiefs would probably still win against a tired Bills defense that was completely incapable of stopping them. The game would just go on longer, the defenses would be even more tired, and the risk of injury would be greater. So here's my proposal:

I propose the NFL get rid of coin tosses.

Get rid of the coin toss

I think the NFL should go back to having sudden death overtime, and should get rid of the coin toss entirely. Instead of having a coin toss, the visiting team should just be able to chose whether it wants to receive the opening kickoff, and the home team should be able to chose whether they want to receive the overtime kickoff. This might sound unfair, but the idea here is to remove a coin toss from the equation, and make the opening possession of overtime become a part of a team's home-field advantage.

In regular season games, teams play half their games at home -- or at least they do over a 2-year average, since the NFL added a 17th game to the schedule. This means each team will have a 50/50 change of getting the opening possession in regular season overtimes, so it's fair. In the post-season, the home team is determined by playoff seeding, which is a function of the teams' regular season records. The team with the better regular season record gets homefield in a playoff matchup. This means that getting the opening kickoff in a playoff overtime will be a privilege that the home team will have earned by having the better record (or the seeding tie-breaker).

This preseason did not go as I expected it to. I was hoping to get more of a look at what Matt Nagy's offense will look like, but the starters hardly got any playing time at all.

Chase Daniel dramatically turned his play around after the Hall of Fame game.

A lot of teams this preseason seemed to hold their starters. This is a continuation of a trend that we've been seeing over the past few years or so, as teams wanted to avoid injuries to marquee players. However, rule changes before the season made a huge difference. The NFL changed the rules so that teams don't have to cut any preseason players until after the final game. Teams are going from 90 players to 53 players between the last preseason game and the first regular season game. Because of this, the teams have a lot more reserves still on their rosters that they can continue to evaluate, and they seem to be taking advantage of that.

After a rough outing in the Hall of Fame game, backup QB Chase Daniel pulled his preseason together and was actually the best-performing quarterback on the team. Part of that is because he also got a majority of the snaps. Trubisky didn't even play in the last two preseason games, and Tyler Bray got limited action.

Preseason standouts like Tanner Gentry and Taquan Mizzell were retained on the practice squad.

Tyler Bray did get the start for most of the final preseason game, and he had some pretty good drives. The team couldn't pull out a win, as the Bills' reserves outplayed the Bears' in the fourth quarter.