Regardless of how the first half went, he, the team doctors and head athletic trainer Ryan Vermillion would get the team’s first-year coach an IV once everyone got settled in the locker room, a measure he’d take to deal with the effects of his ongoing battle with squamous cell cancer.

But he knew there would be loose ends he’d have to deal with after kickoff, and one was what football circumstance his group would be in after 30 minutes.

And while Rivera’s group rallied to gain some momentum late in the half, it still faced a 10-point deficit against a defending division champion that still carries a good handful of core players from the Super Bowl champion team of three years ago.

“I leaned over to Malcom and I said, Hey get somebody to step up now,” Rivera recounted on Sunday night, as he drove home from FedEx Field.

“And there’s a high-pitched voice just going at it, going at it,” Rivera continued.

“It was kind of cool to see that he was the one that did it,” Rivera said.

The newly-named Washington Football Team answered that challenge resoundingly.

To say Rivera and his team have been through a lot over the last six months would be like saying the Kardashians have had some family drama.

Among the things Washington has faced ….

That would be a lot for any group of 20-somethings to compartmentalize, but this was a group of players also working through a complete overhaul of football operations, with the old team president/GM and coach gone, and new people in to run the show.

As he sees it, it’s why he was hired—he’s a coach with a reputation for leadership and an ability to set a culture, which is exactly what Washington needed.

“Without a doubt,” he said.

We're trying to correct those things.

So I said to the guys, Don't go backwards with anybody.

“Let's just keep going forward.

Let's talk about what we can impact and how we can make things happen as opposed to what's already happened.”.

“What's kind of interesting was I looked around and I realized nobody was panicking,” Rivera said.

They were all just like, 'OK what's going on.

Let's calm down.’ So I just got on the headset and I just said, 'Hey fellas we don't have a 17-point play.

So why don't we just take it one play at a time and see what happens.

“I always tell him about incompletions, if you’re throwing the ball to the right place, that’s the first step,” Rivera said.

Haskins was going where he was supposed to with the ball, he just needed the execution to catch up with everything else.

Similarly, on defense, coordinator Jack Del Rio got into a groove as a play-caller after good early-down play pinned the Eagles in long-yardage situations, allowing the DC to turn difference-making rookie Chase Young loose.

“It was just one play at a time, one play at a time, one play at a time,” said Rivera.

Put it all together and, improbably, the Washington Football Team was taking knees inside the Eagles 10 late in the fourth quarter—holding a 10-point lead over a team that looked like it was in a totally different stratosphere hours earlier.

Of course, Rivera knows how little all this could mean in the grand scheme of things, and his own condition is a grim reminder of how constant the challenges will be this year.

“I got a little tired at the end, I did,” he said.

He then paused and said, “So it was nice.”?

“Playing Brady's frustrating,” Saints DE Cam Jordan said from the locker room.

“When you talk about it, it doesn't really matter what the offensive line that's in front of him is.

“I’m not kidding,” Jordan said, almost gleefully.

“Our defense has been doing this,” Jordan said.

• Sanders converted a crucial third-and-6 in the fourth quarter, then fought into the end zone for a five-yard TD on the next play.

Early on, it looked like Brady’s might actually be the better one, with the Saints punting five plays in and the Bucs going 85 yards in nine snaps to take a 7-0 lead.

“We had some things that we had to correct and once we corrected those, we were dialed in,” Jordan said.

A double-pass from Brees to Hill to Kamara came with 2:33 left and the Saints up 34-23, and only a review on what looked like a Kamara touchdown prevented New Orleans from tacking on more.

But even without that score, the message seems to be pretty clear on how good these Saints can be, and Jordan was willing to say they may be as good as any Saints team he’s been on since 2011.

“It's Week 1,” Jordan said.

Jordan didn’t seem like he was kidding when he said that either.

And as head coach Sean McDermott saw it afterwards, that happened because, as he tried to get his team to see all summer, nothing really had to change.

I think at the end of the day, this is a tough league to win in so you coach every week the same with respect for the opponent and be steadfast in your preparation to improve as a football team.

Listen we're going to go against a good Miami football team next week and, look, we got some guys that are banged up.

The first one concerned the circumstance everyone was in—the offseason was different and it was hard to know how the team would play.

“[PR chief] Derek [Boyko], who's sitting to my right, would tell ya, what you saw today is how we've been practicing,” McDermott said.

We've been trying to simulate game situations, throwing different things at our offense, throwing different things at our defense, throwing different things at our special teams, no different.

And he got proof of that in how the team burst from the gate like Seattle Slew.

Josh Allen’s been maligned plenty for piloting a team that’s slowly become more and more talented around him, with guys like Tre’Davious White, Stefon Diggs, Tremaine Edmunds, Ed Oliver and Dion Dawkins now making up one of the NFL’s most talented young cores.

“I think one of the greatest assets that he has, he's a good teammate that remains humble and that's important, that the players see that” McDermott said.

I think that's a mirror of our football team, which is good when your quarterback is wired that way.”.

But more than just that, the vision Marrone had for the team amid the roster shift (dumping a lot of guys who didn’t want to be there) came together in the fight the Jaguars showed Sunday, battling back from four different deficits over the course of the afternoon.

“We count on the coaches to put us in a good position, and the coaches told us that they had a vision of having a team that's united and together and that's going to play for each other.

Now, can we sit here in September and say Minshew’s good enough for the team to pass on a generational quarterback prospect.

“We still got things that we can do better but 19-for-20 is something that you can't argue with,” Chark said.

You don't really worry about next year's draft or anything like that because we have a whole year to play and we're going to make the most of it.

And his play shows it as well.”.

And it’s just as clear the focus has been on ridding the team of players who operated as if they were on scholarship.

My old buddy Jason Cole—an alum of Yahoo!, Bleacher Report and the Miami Herald, and a veteran of three decades of NFL coverage—has a book coming out Tuesday on one of the most fascinating pro football figures of my lifetime.

“I think some things were said that didn’t need to be said and I’ll just leave it at that.”.

The NBC broadcast definitely made SoFi Stadium out to be the star of its first Sunday Night Football show of 2020.

But the Rams’ biggest issue last year was the line, and that problem vanished against a really good Dallas front Sunday night.

Just look at the play selection:.

Now, a couple of Newton’s runs weren’t called, and it’s unlikely we’re going to see a 2-to-1 disparity like this every week.

That said, and like I said above, this is how the Patriots have been trending for a while—another zig when the rest of the league is zagging.

It’s also something that should specifically work this year.

Back when the Patriots signed Newton, I had someone who was there in 2011 reach out and mention how that year, the lockout year, they knew team conditioning was going to be at a premium and the number of big plays would be up with out-of-shape defenses getting gashed.

That play call, as it was explained to me, was really about matching Miller up out of the slot and then Miller beating Tony McRae, which he did?

But it’s not like McRae got his pants pulled down on the play either.

But Arizona reeled off five first downs in the process, getting things on track for good.

So essentially, it’s a pick that might’ve gotten them a receiver like Laviska Shenault or K.J.

18, and that was followed by kicker Randy Bullock getting hurt kicking (and missing) a game-tying, 31-yard field goal on the next play.

So how was the play, Mrs.

Actually, it was really good.

Maybe most impressive was how unaffected he seemed to be in that spot, calmly moving from one play to the next.

“He doesn’t rattle at all,” said one Bengal staffer.

And the Chargers are going to be a good team.

Before the Nickell Robey-Coleman play in January of that year led to wholesale change in the way the rules were legislated, I remember OPI being a pretty rarely-called penalty.

Likewise, Marquez Valdes-Scantling finally looked like the dangerous No.

2) I also think players like Justin Fields and Trevor Lawrence—who NFL fans will obviously be hearing a lot from soon—found their voice over the last two months. And that’s one heck of a benefit that came out of a tumultuous time for college football. Coaches have always been the faces of the big programs, and they’ll continue to be. But the more comfortable the players become with talking, the better it is for them and the more ready they’ll all be for pro football.?

3) Lawrence looked every bit the first overall pick on Saturday night. Every throw looked easy for him, and he continued to flash the wheels that we saw in last year’s College Football Playoff. Health-permitting, it’ll be tough to poke holes in him as a draft prospect..

4) I’m not going to lie … seeing Oklahoma walking a COVID-19 tightrope definitely gave me pause on what everything is going to look like at the college level in October and November, because Lincoln Riley has been about as diligent as anyone about respecting the virus with his team. It’s an example, too, of why testing daily, rather than two or three times a week, is key. Gaps in testing, quite simply, can open the door for COVID-19 to get in..

6) Observation: The bands help a lot, to distract you from the fact that you’re watching football in an empty stadium.

Every week, we’ll give you a Q&A with a star player from the Monday Night Football matchup.

This week, it’s new Broncos corner A.J?

Like you said, there’s no preseason, so it’s hard to evaluate where you’re at in a live game, even though the starters would have limited reps anyways.

MMQB: What are you most nervous about then, given how different it’s been.

I had two years where I practiced but I didn’t play in the preseason games, and I went straight into the game and it was really just adapting, getting used to it.

It’s tough.

Yes, we lost an amazing playmaker who’s not gonna be out there, but it’s a chance for you to make a name for yourself and to step up and make plays.

AB: It’s not difficult, just because my mindset was, as soon as I’d seen they traded Jalen [Ramsey], they were gonna go in a different direction.

I think when it really hit me was when they traded Calais Campbell, it was like, O.K., now, you see what they’re trying to do!

That’s one thing we really couldn’t do in Jacksonville

Playing against different teams, they’d run different things than they ran against Jacksonville, but when certain things show up on tape, and I see it with other teams, it’s, O.K., now, I get why they run this, and who’s in this position and who’s in this position

And that’s why this whole thing started, just to bring attention to it that it wasn’t getting

And just to have the Broncos and the NFL back us up with this means a lot

AB: Yeah, I thought about what it’s going to be like, limited fans

One thing coach has done, he’s made sure we scrimmaged in the stadium without fans, he had the simulated crowd noise and things like that

It’s definitely gonna be different

It’s something we’re gonna have to get used to, not knowing when we’re going to have it 100% back

But it’s not as tough anymore

I’d just say that if saying what he said there causes a single person to gather the courage to go get help, then that makes Dak Prescott a hero