Sherman Lewis, whose long coaching career included 12 seasons as an NFL offensive coordinator, has died at the age of 83.
Lewis was an All-American halfback at Michigan State, and in 1963 he finished third in Heisman Trophy voting. He also won three Big Ten titles in track and field.
Although he was drafted by both the NFL and the AFL in 1964, he chose to begin his professional playing career in the CFL with the Toronto Argonauts. He would later play in the AFL for the Jets in 1966 and 1967, seeing most of his action as a punt and kickoff returner.
In 1969, after his playing career ended, Lewis returned to Michigan State to begin his coaching career. He was an assistant for the Spartans for 13 years before Bill Walsh hired him to work on the 49ers’ coaching staff in 1983. Lewis stayed in San Francisco for nine seasons.
In 1992, 49ers assistant Mike Holmgren was hired as head coach of the Packers, and Holmgren hired Lewis to be his offensive coordinator, a role Lewis filled for Holmgren’s entire tenure in Green Bay.
After eight years as the Packers’ offensive coordinator, Lewis spent two years as the Vikings’ offensive coordinator and two more years as the Lions’ offensive coordinator. His final season of coaching took place in Washington in 2009.
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Tom Brady has spent the past two seasons working as a broadcaster for Fox. He has yet to call a game in New England.
That will change this season.
Fox announced that Brady will be in the booth for the Patriots’ Week 9 game against the Packers, which is set for a 4:25 p.m. kickoff.
“He’s backkkkk,” Fox wrote in a social media post.
It seems a certainty that the Patriots will honor Rob Gronkowski at that game. The former tight end was recently elected into the Patriots Hall of Fame, and the team announced last month that the date of Gronkowski’s induction would be announced at a later date.
Brady spent 20 seasons with the Patriots, winning six of his seven Super Bowls there. Gronkowski played with Brady for nine seasons in New England and two in Tampa.
Brady retired in the 2023 offseason.
There’s set to be a familiar name on the Michigan football team for the 2027 season.
Charles Woodson Jr. has committed to play for the Wolverines, per Hayes Fawcett of On3.com. Woodson is a defensive back who attends high school in Orlando, Florida.
The name is familiar in Ann Arbor because Charles Woodson is one of the greatest players to ever put on a maize and blue uniform. Woodson became the first primarily defensive player to win the Heisman Trophy while leading Michigan to a national title in 1997. Woodson went on to play for Raiders and Packers during an NFL career that featured a defensive player of the year award, a Super Bowl title and a place in the Pro Football Hall of Fame.
Those make for big steps to follow and the younger Woodson is following the first of them by committing to Michigan.
We don’t know if Fernando Mendoza will be starting at quarterback for the Raiders in Week 1 of the regular season, but we do know who the Raiders will be playing in the first overall pick’s potential debut.
The NFL’s schedule reveal on Thursday night shows that the Raiders will host the Dolphins at 4:25 p.m. ET on Sunday, September 13. The game will be on Fox.
Mendoza will have to get the nod over Kirk Cousins in order to start for the Raiders. Offseason addition Malik Willis is expected to make his first appearance for the Dolphins. Both teams will definitely have head coaches making their offseason debut as Las Vegas hired Klint Kubiak in February and Miami hired Jeff Hafley in January.
Sunday will also feature a pair of divisional games in the late afternoon window. The Packers will visit the Vikings while the Commanders will be in Philadelphia to renew their acquaintance with the Eagles. The NFC North matchup will be on CBS while the NFC East clash will be broadcast by Fox.
The other late game on Sunday afternoon will see the Cardinals visiting the Chargers on CBS. Arizona could have Jacoby Brissett, Gardner Minshew or rookie Carson Beck at quarterback for that contest.
The 1 p.m. ET games will send the Bills to Houston for a date with the Texans while the Browns go on the road against the Jaguars. The Colts will host the Ravens, the Saints will visit the Lions, the Buccaneers will travel to Cincinnati for Dexter Lawrence’s first game as a Bengal, and the Steelers will kick off the Mike McCarthy era — with or without Aaron Rodgers — at home against the Falcons.
Previous reports revealed that the Jets will be in Tennessee and that the Bears will head to Charlotte to face the Panthers. The Jets-Titans game will be on CBS along with the Bills-Texans, Ravens-Colts and Browns-Jaguars games. All the other 1 p.m. games will be on Fox.
The entire Week 1 slate will kick off on Wednesday, September 9 with a Patriots-Seahawks Super Bowl rematch in Seattle on NBC. Thursday will bring a Netflix game between the 49ers and Rams in the NFL’s first game in Melbourne and Sunday night will find the Cowboys at MetLife Stadium to meet the Giants on NBC’s Sunday Night Football. Those games were all announced ahead of Thursday’s full schedule reveal, which was also the case for the ESPN Monday night game between the Broncos and Chiefs in Kansas City.
The Rams and Seahawks played three nail-biters during the 2025 season and the NFL is banking on another one on Christmas night.
The matchup of NFC West teams will cap a three-game slate on Christmas this year. The Friday night game on December 25 will take place in Seattle and it will be broadcast by Fox.
Los Angeles won 21-19 at home last November, but lost 38-37 in overtime in Seattle later in the regular season. The final meeting between the clubs came in the NFC Championship Game and was a 31-27 Seahawks win.
Netflix will kick off the day’s games with a doubleheader that starts with the Packers visiting the Bears at 1 p.m. ET. The Bills will be in Denver at 4:30 p.m. ET in a rematch of last season’s divisional round game that the Broncos won in overtime.
With Christmas Eve falling on a Thursday, there will also be a game on Amazon Prime Video that night. The Eagles will travel to Houston to face the Texans, so all four games around the Christmas holiday will feature matchups of teams that were in the playoffs last season.
The NFL announced the matchups for its first Thanksgiving Eve game and all three Thanksgiving games ahead of Thursday night’s schedule reveal, so the only thing left to announce for the three-day holiday spread of games was the Black Friday matchup.
That game will feature the Broncos visiting the Steelers in a game that will start at 3 p.m. ET. The game will be broadcast on Amazon Prime Video.
It will be the first time that either franchise has played a Black Friday game. The NFL first held a game on the day after Thanksgiving in 2023 and NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell has said that the league is considering ways to add a second game.
That is what they’ve done with the Thanksgiving Eve game. It will involve the Packers visiting the Rams on Wednesday night in a game broadcast by Netflix.
Thanksgiving’s schedule will start in Detroit as usual. The Lions will host the Bears at 1 p.m. ET on CBS and the Eagles will visit the Cowboys on Fox at 4:30 p.m. ET. Thursday’s action will conclude with the Chiefs in Buffalo to face the Bills at 8:20 p.m. ET on NBC.
The Packers have all of their 2026 draft picks under contract.
Second-round cornerback Brandon Cisse became the final member of the group to sign his four-year rookie deal on Thursday. The Packers selected six players in the draft overall.
Cisse had 27 tackles, an interception, 1.5 tackles for loss and a forced fumble while at South Carolina last year. He spent his first two college years at N.C. State.
The Packers also announced their previously reported waiver claim of wide receiver Brenden Rice. The NFL’s transaction report shows that they made space for him on the roster by waiving tight end Luke Lachey with a failed physical designation. The Packers claimed Lachey on waivers earlier this week.
The Dolphins are bringing in a player who’s familiar with their new General Manager and head coach.
Miami has claimed defensive tackle James Ester off of waivers, according to the league’s daily transaction wire.
Ester, who entered the league as an undrafted free agent in 2024, has spent the last two seasons on the Packers’ practice squad. He was waived by the club earlier this week.
Dolphins G.M. Jon-Eric Sullivan and head coach Jeff Hafley were both previously with the Packers, giving them some inside knowledge about Ester.
Ester, however, has not yet appeared in a regular-season game.
Last month, Senator Tammy Baldwin (D-WI) introduced legislation aimed at ensuring free, over-the-air access by citizens of a given state to all nationally-televised games involving the teams headquartered there. Naturally, then, she was dismayed to learn that the Packers-Rams game on Thanksgiving Eve will be streamed exclusively by Netflix.
“As the cost of just about everything continues to rise, the NFL is once again asking Wisconsinites to spend their hard-earned money on another streaming service,” Baldwin said. “Enough is enough. My ‘For the Fans Act’ would stop this exact scenario and prevent Wisconsin families from being forced to pay for Netflix just to watch the Packers play this Thanksgiving.”
The development comes at a time when the NFL is facing unprecedented political pressure, on multiple fronts. The Department of Justice is investigating whether the NFL has exceeded its current broadcast antitrust exemption. Fox owner Rupert Murdoch, through the op-ed pages of his Wall Street Journal and the back channels of government, has pushed the question of whether the existing exemption should be scrapped.
In Wisconsin, the Packers-Rams game to be played the night before Thanksgiving will be televised by network affiliates in Green Bay and Milwaukee. The rest of WI will be SOL, absent a Netflix subscription. That same dynamic will apply to any Packers games on Prime Video.
Whether the For the Fans Act goes anywhere remains to be seen. Regardless, the complaints about requiring fans to pay to watch standalone NFL games is here to stay, until further notice.
Packers General Manager Brian Gutekunst said earlier this month that the team expects edge rusher Micah Parsons to return early in the 2026 season after recovering from a torn ACL, but did not put any more specific time frame on how much time Parsons could miss.
A report on Thursday does a little more on that front. Adam Schefter of ESPN reports that Parsons is a candidate to open the season on the physically unable to perform list.
If that’s the case, Parsons will not be able to play in the first four weeks of the regular season. He would be able to return to practice during that window, which would be important because remaining on the PUP list into the regular season would mean Parsons was not participating in training camp practices.
A clearer sense of when Parsons will be available will come well before Week 1 and the Packers will find out which games Parsons might miss when the NFL schedule is released on Thursday night.
