Quick Hits

• Football is back. The NFL's 2026 season opens Wednesday night when the Patriots visit Seattle — and it's a juicy one: a rematch of February's Super Bowl, which New England lost. Patriots quarterback Drake Maye is openly using that loss as motivation, per ESPN.
• College football's opening weekend ended in chaos. Michigan needed a disputed replay ruling to beat Western Michigan on a walk-off touchdown, while LSU and Miami looked like legitimate national title threats in blowout wins.
• Tua Tagovailoa has a new home. The Falcons named the former Dolphins Pro Bowler their starting quarterback — Atlanta's sixth different Week 1 starter in six straight seasons.
• Champions League soccer returns Tuesday with a heavyweight opener: Real Madrid hosts Inter at the Bernabeu, with Jose Mourinho set to face his former club.
• Baseball's regular season is down to its final month. ESPN's experts have weighed in on every division race, and expansion talk — Montreal, Nashville, Salt Lake City — is heating up.

Minnesota Teams

Quiet day on the Minnesota front — no Vikings, Twins, Timberwolves, Wild, Lynx, United or Gophers headlines made the national roundup today. The biggest local-relevant note: the Vikings' season opener arrives this week as the NFL launches Week 1 across the league, starting with Wednesday night's Kickoff Game.

NFL

The season technically starts Wednesday, so this week's news is all anticipation. The headliner is Patriots at Seahawks — the league's annual Thursday-style opener, played midweek — and ESPN says Maye, who's coming off an MVP-caliber season, is channeling the Super Bowl loss into his 2026 campaign.

Elsewhere in the quarterback carousel: Tua Tagovailoa, whose Miami tenure made him a Pro Bowler, is now under center in Atlanta, where the Falcons haven't started the same quarterback in back-to-back season openers since 2020.

CBS's Pete Prisco dropped his first Power Rankings of the year, crowning the Rams his No. 1-ish "super team" while openly wondering if they're too good to be true — and telling readers to keep an eye on the Jaguars and Cowboys. (A "power ranking" is just sportswriters ordering teams from best to worst; it's opinion, not math.) Early betting lines have the Cowboys as road favorites against the Giants, while the Panthers are underdogs to the Bears — a position CBS notes is familiar territory for Carolina.

MLB

With under a month left in the regular season, ESPN's panel of experts published their final-month predictions covering division winners, wild card races and stat leaders — worth a skim if you want to sound smart at a Labor Day barbecue.

The bigger baseball conversation is happening off the field: ESPN's Jeff Passan reports that once the next collective bargaining agreement is signed, an expansion committee won't be far behind. Salt Lake City, Nashville, Montreal and Raleigh are the leading candidates for new teams.

College Sports

Week 1 will be remembered for its finish in Ann Arbor. Michigan beat Western Michigan on a walk-off touchdown that only counted after a Big Ten replay ruling on the final play — CBS ranked it among the most controversial endings in the sport's history, and Western Michigan's leadership chose to accept the ruling rather than fight it.

The on-field winners: Miami and LSU, whose emphatic opening wins have CBS's bowl projections treating both as national championship threats, and LSU has crashed the projected top 10 of the new AP rankings while Oregon and Michigan fell. (The AP Top 25 is the media's weekly poll; "crashing the top 10" means jumping way up.) Week 1 wrapped up on Labor Day with SMU facing Florida State in the Monday headliner.

One feel-good story worth knowing: Tennessee linebacker Arion Carter, suspended one game for accepting $427 from an agent, has turned the episode into a cancer-donation drive — as he put it, trying to make a negative into a positive.

NBA

The season tips off in a couple of months, and the biggest storyline ESPN is tracking is the return of injured stars: Tyrese Haliburton, Kyrie Irving, Luka Doncic, Jimmy Butler and Damian Lillard are all working their way back and worth watching when games resume in the fall.

Other Sports

Soccer: The Champions League — European club soccer's biggest competition — begins its league phase this week. Tuesday's marquee match is Real Madrid vs. Inter at the Bernabeu, with Mourinho (who has coached both clubs) facing his old Inter side; CBS marked the occasion by ranking the best players he's ever coached, from Cristiano Ronaldo to Diego Milito. Manchester City opens at Porto, boosted by a summer spending spree headlined by a deadline-day move for midfielder Enzo Fernandez from Chelsea.

Boxing: Ryan Garcia defends his WBC welterweight title (that's the 147-pound division) against Conor Benn in a Zuffa Boxing card — a matchup of two of the sport's more talked-about names.