Upon Further Review: What To Make Of New OCs, And Other Things To Know In Week 1

Tuesday, in a traditional NFL game week, is a day off. We’re here to help you through that, as the last word wrapping up the weekend was and the first look at what’s still ahead. Each week, we’ll take you inside the league, making the extra call, researching a wild stat and introducing the names and faces that will shape the 2026 season in success and struggle. And while we’re introducing things, the NFL will have 21 new offensive coordinators this season, a testament to the boom-or-bust nature of the job, where you’re either hot enough to become a head coach or ordinary enough to get fired. The middle ground is a thin strip of land, such that every NFL team will play more than half its schedule against new offensive coordinators. As if starting a season in Australia weren’t challenge enough, the San Francisco 49ers will play 15 of 17 games against new offensive coordinators: their first eight opponents and their final seven. The Las Vegas Raiders, Los Angeles Chargers and New England Patriots have 14 such games as well, and especially early in the season, it’s that much harder to prepare, not knowing exactly what an opponent’s offense will actually look like. To appreciate the full range of which way a new offensive coordinator can go, consider the Seattle Seahawks. Their new offensive coordinator in 2024, Ryan Grubb, got fired and is now back in college football at Alabama. His replacement, Klint Kubiak, parlayed a Super Bowl championship into becoming head coach of the Raiders. The new offensive coordinator you’re perhaps least likely to have heard of before is Seattle’s Brian Fleury, a defensive assistant as recently as 2019 and the 49ers’ tight ends coach the last four years. Game prep for Week 1 games can often mean pulling tape from a coach’s previous stops, sometimes even in college, to better anticipate what’s coming. Then you have games like Cardinals-Chargers, where Arizona has a new head coach in Mike LaFleur and a new offensive coordinator in Nathaniel Hackett going up against a first-time defensive coordinator in Los Angeles’ Chris O’Leary, who spent 2024 as the Chargers’ safety coach and was defensive coordinator at Western Michigan last year. “With a lot of new faces calling plays in the league, you approach it like early games on your schedule,” O’Leary told me. “You use old film in the early parts of the year to see what they’ve done historically and also see what those teams have done in the past to make their current roster of players successful. “As the season goes on, you have film from earlier in the season that you put a heavier emphasis on, but still watch that old tape to have a big picture of what those playcallers like to do and their tendencies.” Want an underdog to root for in 2026? Try nearly any defending division champ. Finishing in first place means a first-place schedule, and while that’s only three games out of 17, it sets up a default expectation of regression for the best teams of last season. Of eight defending division champs, just one is the oddsmakers’ favorite to repeat: the Philadelphia Eagles, who are still predicted to finish a game ahead of the Dallas Cowboys (via projected win totals). But four other division champs — the Denver Broncos, Chicago Bears, Pittsburgh Steelers and Carolina Panthers — face the third-best odds out of four teams to win their divisions, so even finishing second is seen as overachieving. If it seems like overreaction, it really isn’t. Of the eight 2024 division champs, only one (Eagles) pulled off the repeat, and only two out of eight (Houston Texans and Los Angeles Rams) improved on their 2024 record. Add up the win totals for the 2024 division champs, and those teams combined to win 21 fewer games in 2025, an average drop of 2.6 wins. The idea that the NFC East is the lone source of continuity is amusing in itself, in that the Eagles’ repeat last year ended a run of different teams winning the division every year from 2005 to 2024. I’ve had international datelines as an NFL writer, but none of them across the International Date Line, as the 49ers and Rams are in Australia this week. You can get jet lag just from doing the math on what time it is there. Their game will be broadcast from Melbourne with an 8:35 p.m. ET kickoff Thursday, but will go in the history books as a Friday game because local time for kickoff is 10:35 a.m. Friday. “I feel like I’m in the future,” 49ers coach Kyle Shanahan said Monday, trying to understand calling home to talk to his family, which is somehow the day before. Stranger still: Even though the game will be kicked off in the morning down under, it will qualify officially as a “prime time game,” according to the Elias Sports Bureau, which recognizes a prime time game as any that has its kickoff at 7 p.m. ET or later. The NFL generally avoids Friday games except for recent forays into Black Friday as an expansion of Thanksgiving games. It’s the first time either the 49ers or Rams have played on a Friday in nearly 40 years, and both of their last two Friday games were against each other, with Joe Montana leading San Francisco to wins over Los Angeles in pre-Christmas regular-season finales in 1984 and 1986. Which NFL head coaches have the best record in Week 1 games? Only 11 out of 32 have a winning record as head coaches in Week 1 — another 11 have never won an opener as head coach, though six of those are guys making their debut this week. The best? The Chargers’ Jim Harbaugh is 6-0 and the Eagles’ Nick Sirianni is 5-0, with the Rams’ Sean McVay close behind with a 7-2 record in Week 1. After those, the coach whose Week 1 record is most improved from their overall record is Tampa Bay Buccaneers head coach Todd Bowles, who has a .452 winning percentage for his career, but a 6-2 (.750) mark in season openers. Most curiously bad Week 1 coach? That might be the Patriots’ Mike Vrabel, who has a .586 win percentage overall but is 2-5 for his career in Week 1 and has to go across the country to face the Seahawks on Wednesday. And temper your expectations for new head coaches in their first year on the job. Last year, those coaches went 1-6 in Week 1, with the Jacksonville Jaguars head coach Liam Coen getting the lone win. This year’s rookie coaches are good for at least one win, unless the Raiders and Miami Dolphins manage to tie with Kubiak and Jeff Hafley squaring off in their first games as head coaches. Of the rest, only the Baltimore Ravens’ Jesse Minter, opening against the Indianapolis Colts, is favored to win. One of the more obscure but fun streaks you can keep an eye on this week: The Bucs have gotten a touchdown from a rookie receiver in Week 1 in each of the last three seasons: Trey Palmer in 2023, Jalen McMillan in 2024 and two from Emeka Egbuka last year. Can Ted Hurst, a third-round pick from Georgia State with a promising mix of size and speed, keep that streak going this week as they face the Bengals in Cincinnati? Just remember that nobody gets touchdowns from rookie receivers in Week 1 wins like the Bucs do. Since 2023, they have four, and the rest of the NFL has … three of them, total.