Today is the last Sunday of our lives without NFL football, and the league’s own Twitter account spent the morning treating it like New Year’s Eve, posting a countdown nobody asked for and everybody needed.

Nobody coordinated this. The NFL’s own account put up the countdown, Underdog followed within the hour, and by lunchtime half of football Twitter was running the same bit without a group chat to organize it. That’s the tell. The league doesn’t have to manufacture hype for kickoff anymore. A last Sunday without football has become a shared ritual, baked into the calendar the same way a countdown clock owns your last night of December.

Here’s one that showed up in my feed within the hour:

https://twitter.com/MySportsUpdate/status/2096602650837926373

Nobody at the league office had to ask that account to post it. It just happened, which is the entire point.

Here’s the actual news buried under the vibes: the 2026 season kicks off Wednesday, September 9, with the defending champion Seahawks hosting the Patriots at Lumen Field, a Super Bowl LX rematch against the team Seattle just beat to close last season. Wednesday. Not Thursday, not the kickoff slot everyone’s had memorized since childhood. The league needed the runway for its first-ever game in Australia later that same week, which is how the champs’ Super Bowl rematch got bumped to Wednesday instead of the traditional slot. It’s only the second time that’s happened in the Super Bowl era. This is, officially, the last day before the NFL season starts.

As a Jets fan, I have exactly one emotional stake in this specific matchup, and it’s watching the Patriots get run off their own Wednesday in prime time before I’ve had my morning coffee on a workday.

I’d also like it on the record that Drake Maye and the Patriots have to open their season against the team that just ended theirs, on national television, in the middle of the week. Maye deserves better than that scheduling department. Sam Darnold does not, because Sam Darnold just won a Super Bowl and gets to do whatever he wants now.

None of this is really about the Seahawks or the Patriots, though. It’s about the fact that a Sunday with zero football on it has become an event of its own, a day people mark the way they mark the last night of a vacation. The DFS crowd is already living in kickoff week hype a full four days early, and everybody’s already arguing about Mahomes’ knee even though the Chiefs don’t open until the following Monday against Denver. That doesn’t care that there’s no game to bet on yet. It just arrives.

That said, I know how this sounds. Grown adults getting sentimental over a Sunday with no games on it is objectively unhinged behavior, and if the Patriots weren’t walking into a national showcase to get embarrassed, I might have more patience for that argument. I don’t, so I won’t.

I’ve been counting down this exact Sunday every September since I dropped out of Rutgers to run a blog nobody asked for, and my parents still bring that up at dinner. This is the last Sunday without football we’re getting all year. Enjoy the silence while the couch is still just a couch and not a war room.