Football

9/14/2026 |  NFL Kickoff Ratings Dip on Wednesday (Front Office Sports) The NFL and NBC Sports began the 2026 regular season in surprisingly downbeat fashion. 
The network said last Wednesday’s kickoff game between the Patriots and Seahawks, won by Seattle 13–10, averaged 25.1 million viewers. That figure was down 11% from last year’s season opener, which aired on a Thursday, and was the least-watched start to an NFL season since 2022.

9/13/2026 |  Texas Tops AP Poll As SEC Asserts Early Dominance Over Big Ten (Front Office Sports) Is a changing of the guard afoot in college football?
After a dominant three-year run by the Big Ten Conference atop the sport, the SEC is reasserting itself as Texas rose to the top of the new Associated Press Top-25 poll released Sunday afternoon. The Longhorns’ ascendance comes after the team came back from a 23–3 fourth-quarter deficit Saturday night to upset Ohio State, the prior No. 1-ranked team, by a 24–23 score.

9/11/2026 |  Florida A&M Made $760,000 to Lose by 70 Points to Miami (Front Office Sports) Florida A&M received a large payday for its Thursday night football game against No. 7 Miami—$760,000 in exchange for a 77–7 defeat, or nearly $10,000 per point given up. 
The Rattlers athletics program will receive $720,000 and the school’s band, the Marching 100, will receive the other $40,000 according to a records request by the Tallahassee Democrat.

9/11/2026 |  NIL Got Kirby Smart to Give In on All-White Uniforms (Front Office Sports) Georgia will wear all-white uniforms for the first time in school history this weekend when it takes on Western Kentucky in Athens.
The slick alternate kit, titled “Unleashed” by the football department, is the result of a fundraising challenge posed to Bulldogs fans by head coach Kirby Smart during a press conference back in March: If subscriptions to Glory Glory—a paywalled website that houses content relating to Georgia athletics—tripled before the team’s spring game on April 18, he said, Georgia would wear white uniforms for a 2026 regular-season matchup.

9/11/2026 |  Kirk Herbstreit Embraces College Football’s Influencer Era () Social media influencers have flocked to big sports events for years now, but the trend has accelerated recently, in particular with tennis majors like the U.S. Open. 
Last weekend showed that content creators have come to college football, too. Nowhere was that more evident than in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, where LSU head coach Lane Kiffin walked into his debut rout of Clemson flanked by “seven or eight super high-level influencers,” as Kirk Herbstreit put it in an interview this week with Front Office Sports.