Culture
Week 8 NFL roundtable: Cowboys-49ers, NFC North prowess, Bucs injuries and Browns’ woes
A sudden shift could take place for more than a few NFL teams in Week 8.
The Atlanta Falcons and Tampa Bay Buccaneers meet in the second of two NFC South showdowns. The Philadelphia Eagles–Cincinnati Bengals loser might feel like any good fortune they’ve built up over the last few weeks will vanish. The AFC South could get tighter when the Houston Texans host the Indianapolis Colts. Two struggling NFC powers in the Dallas Cowboys and San Francisco 49ers meet on Sunday night.
What Week 8 storylines interest our trio of NFL writers in Mike Sando, Zak Keefer and Jeff Howe? Read more for a Sunday primer.
The Vikings (now 5-2) fell to the Rams on Thursday night. The Bears (at Commanders), Lions (vs. Titans) and Packers (at Jaguars) are all in action Sunday. Who is your pick to win the NFC North right now? Do you envision all four teams making the playoffs?
Sando: Detroit is a clear favorite with a victory at Minnesota already, the best roster and the most “time on task” with this group of coaches/players. I do not think all four teams from the division will reach the playoffs, but it could trend that way in the short term based on the Bears’ next three games against Washington (without Jayden Daniels), Arizona and New England. NFC North teams will beat up on each other down the stretch.
Keefer: Give me the Lions in the NFC North. The job Dan Campbell continues to do ranks right up there with the best in the league — so far, there has been no hangover from last season’s crushing conference title game loss. Detroit’s winning exactly how he envisioned: with two of the best fronts in the league. And Jared Goff is playing like an MVP. This team is going to be a tough, tough out in the NFC playoffs.
Howe: Even without Aidan Hutchinson, the Lions are still playing like the best team in the NFC. They’re a force on both sides of the ball, especially if Goff remains in the MVP conversation. As for the playoffs, all four teams are good enough to make it, and I would say it’s more than likely all four would finish the season in the NFC’s top seven of our power rankings. But they’re going to beat up on each other while an East or South team could use a more advantageous slate to sneak into the final wild-card spot.
The NFC North has a case for the league’s toughest division in 2024. The Minnesota Vikings fell to 5-2 on Thursday, while Jared Goff (16) and the Detroit Lions will host the Tennessee Titans on Sunday. (Jeffrey Becker / Imagn Images)
A rib injury could rob us of Caleb Williams vs. Jayden Daniels, but Bears-Commanders is a big game nonetheless. What have you liked most about Williams and Daniels? What would you like to see that each rookie QB hasn’t shown or proved yet?
Sando: I like the way both quarterbacks have started from Week 1 without the game seeming too fast for them and without the job (franchise quarterback) seeming too big for them. They both seem equipped to handle the job on and off the field, based on what we’ve seen. Daniels needs to prove he can stay on the field a full season. That is also part of the job of a franchise quarterback. His durability was a concern entering the season. He’s already managing an injury that is threatening to sideline him. For Williams, I’d like to see him fare well against good teams. He hasn’t had many chances to do that yet. The Houston game was a struggle.
Keefer: I spent time with Daniels last week in Washington and — as the story lays out — his preparation is what’s setting him apart. His teammates marvel at how early he shows up to the building every day. And Washington’s offense has been built around what he does well without forcing him to throw it 40 times a game. In Chicago, Williams has been noticeably better of late, but the challenge now is proving it against stiffer competition. Beating up on Carolina and Jacksonville doesn’t mean a whole lot these days. Backing it up after the bye week against Washington — which has led the NFC East since Week 3 — says even more.
Howe: Daniels has done everything right, but I admire the way the Commanders have continuously put him in a position to succeed. The coaching has been terrific, and the run game has helped. Daniels has then done his part to lift his teammates. I’m not sure how much Daniels can improve upon this next point, but the pre-draft concern was his ability to hold up to the physicality, and he’s already dealing with a rib injury. Williams took a little longer to get comfortable due to some line issues and injuries at the skill spots, but he never seemed to lose his way or his confidence. He just kept believing in his ability, and it’s very obvious the game has slowed down for him over the past few weeks. He’s tracking to play with a lot more confidence down the stretch, and I think the potential exists for Williams to help the Bears make a run.
Going by eyes and the odds, the Browns’ woes are about to get worse against the Ravens on Sunday. Step in the GM’s chair in Cleveland. What would you do with Deshaun Watson and his contract?
Sando: I’d release Watson after June 1 in the absence of a deal to launder Watson’s contract through another team. The release would be straightforward — cut him and watch his existing scheduled 2025 cap charge rise from nearly $73 million to nearly $119 million. The contract laundering would provide a longer-shot chance at mitigating some of the cap and cash consequences. Under that scenario, the Browns would trade Watson and draft capital to a team that would accept the draft capital, take on some of the cap/cash burden and release Watson, who would waive his no-trade clause as part of his own exit strategy.
Keefer: I’d beg my bosses — namely owner Jimmy Haslam — to release Watson after June 1 and eat the dead money. It’s a substantial hit (nearly $119 million to the 2025 cap) but I think it’d be the best outcome for both parties in the long run. Cleveland will pay dearly for its mistake, namely that $230 million, fully guaranteed contract it handed him in 2022, but also has the chance to move on without Watson’s situation lingering for years, eating up headlines and holding this team back. There’s no salvaging this. Even if he returns in 2025, Watson will be a $46 million quarterback coming off a major injury who hasn’t looked right in four years. It’s time for logic to prevail, not stubbornness.
GO DEEPER
Deshaun Watson and a Browns escape plan (once they finally admit it’s over): Sando’s Pick Six
Howe: The damage is done. Remember when the prevailing belief was the Packers would struggle in 2023 due to more than $50 million in dead money post-Aaron Rodgers? (I know, that example doesn’t hold up because they played their way into the playoffs, but I’m using it to provide perspective.) Well, the Browns already have $23 million in dead cap in 2025, and a post-June 1 cut would add another $119 million to that. That would create catastrophic ripple effects with the rest of the roster — much worse than the way the Broncos were forced to make cuts after releasing Russell Wilson. The Browns need to stop restructuring Watson’s deal to kick the cap hits down the road. Even if he played at a Mahomes-ian level with a $72.9 million cap hit, the Browns would need to be otherworldly with the players on their rookie contracts to be a playoff threat. Unless they’ve got a plan to spread Watson’s cap hits through void years for decades a la Bobby Bonilla, it’s time to face reality and recognize the contract has sabotaged their roster building for the foreseeable future.
The Mike Evans and Chris Godwin injuries will be a challenge for the Bucs to overcome. The Falcons seem capable of beating anyone and losing to anyone. What is your assessment of the top of the NFC South as these two teams prepare to meet Sunday?
Sando: The Buccaneers were going to win this division and still might. The receiver injuries open the door for the Falcons to overtake them as Kirk Cousins’ surgically repaired Achilles tendon potentially rounds into stronger form late in the season.
Keefer: That’s a pretty good synopsis and one of the reasons I don’t feel like anyone can trust the Falcons right now. The Bucs were my preseason pick to win the NFC South again — they’ve quietly claimed four straight division crowns — but with the recent losses of Evans and Godwin, Atlanta has its opening. A loss Sunday to the Falcons could spell a long couple of weeks for the Bucs. Before the bye, they’ll face each of last year’s Super Bowl teams — Kansas City and San Francisco — in consecutive weeks. Those are not teams you want to play short-handed, even though the 49ers are hurting, as well.
GO DEEPER
Bucs’ Chris Godwin to have surgery; Mike Evans to miss several weeks
Howe: Excluding a couple of troubling stretches when Baker Mayfield has gotten turnover-prone, the QB has played well enough to be a fringe MVP candidate. I think he can still keep the Bucs in contention unless the Falcons flip a switch. Tampa offensive coordinator Liam Coen has also taken the offense to a much higher level, and his concepts will free up the lesser-known guys filling in for Evans and Godwin. I’m still far more concerned with the defense that’s given up the fifth-most points in the league. That’s no way to build a winning streak with troubles on offense. The Falcons had been pretty good until the blowout loss to the Seahawks. I don’t think we’re going to see the best version of Kirk Cousins this season because of the Achilles recovery, but they’re good enough to win the division while keeping games close.
The Cowboys and 49ers cross paths once again in one of the league’s great rivalries. But both teams are struggling. What needs to happen for the 49ers to win? What needs to happen for a Dallas win on Sunday night?
Sando: The 49ers win by running the ball all over Dallas’ weak run defense to control the game flow, delivering an easy night for quarterback Brock Purdy. The Cowboys win with a strong game from Dak Prescott and a game-changing play on special teams, where Dallas has been stronger than San Francisco this season.
Keefer: Personally, I feel like this game is way more about the Cowboys than the 49ers. San Francisco’s not right — too many injuries — but I don’t see Seattle running away with the division. The 49ers just need to stay in the hunt until Christian McCaffrey returns. A December run isn’t out of the question, not for a veteran group like this. But as for Sunday, it feels like the Cowboys’ season is teetering on the brink of collapse. Dallas can’t win at home, can’t beat anyone decent and can’t stop getting in its own way. This matchup won’t help. The 49ers have won three straight over the Cowboys, including two in the playoffs. And remember last year’s meeting: a 42-10 drubbing by San Francisco that foreshadowed the Cowboys’ playoff embarrassment three months later.
Howe: The 49ers’ injuries are the main story, but the subplot — and maybe a peek into a more detrimental issue — has been giving away games. They had no business losing to the Rams and Cardinals with the way those games were played. Then they made too many mistakes to take advantage of the Chiefs. Those are concerning trends for a team with conference championship expectations. I think the 49ers will beat the Cowboys, but they’ve yet to show they can close out a game this season. Meanwhile, the Cowboys haven’t consistently run the ball or stopped the run. Until those elements improve, they won’t be a threat in the NFC.
(Top photo of Caleb Williams: Michael Reaves / Getty Images)
In prehistoric northern Europe, peatlands — areas of waterlogged soil rich with decaying plant matter — were considered spiritual sites. Since then, swords, jewelry and even human bodies have been found fossilized in their sludgy depths. More recently, however, many of these bogs have been depleted by overharvesting, neglect and development. But as awareness of their important role in removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere grows, more wetlands are being restored, while also serving as unlikely creative inspiration. Here’s how bogs are showing up in the culture.
Fashion
At fall 2026 Paris Fashion Week, several houses — including Louis Vuitton (above left) and Hermès — staged shows amid mossy sets featuring spongy green structures and mounds of vegetation. And the Danish fashion brand Solitude Studios is distressing its eerie, grungy looks (above right) by submerging them in a local peat bog.
Contemporary Art
For her exhibition at California’s San José Museum of Art, on view through October, the Chalon Nation artist Christine Howard Sandoval is presenting sculptures, drawings and plant-dyed works (above) exploring how the state’s wetlands were once sites of Indigenous resistance and community. This month, at Storm King Art Center in New York’s Hudson Valley, the conceptual artist Anicka Yi will unveil an outdoor installation featuring six-foot-tall transparent columns holding algae-rich ecosystems cultivated from nearby pond water and soil.
Architecture and Design
The Bog Bothy (above), a mobile design project by the Dublin-based architecture practice 12th Field in collaboration with the Irish Architecture Foundation, was inspired by the makeshift huts once used by peat cutters who harvested the material for fuel. After debuting in the Irish Midlands last year, it’ll tour the region again this summer. In Edinburgh, the designer Oisín Gallagher is making doorstops from subfossilized bog-oak scraps carbon-dated to 3300 B.C.
Fine Dining
At La Grenouillère on France’s north coast, the chef Alexandre Gauthier reflects the restaurant’s reedy, frog-filled river valley landscape with dishes like a “marsh bubble” of herbs encased in hardened sugar. This spring, Aponiente — the chef Ángel León’s restaurant inside a 19th-century tidal mill on Spain’s Bay of Cádiz — added an outdoor dining area on a pier above the neighboring marshland, serving local sea grasses and salt marsh flowers alongside seafood (above) from the estuary.
Literature
The Irish British writer Maggie O’Farrell’s forthcoming novel, “Land,” about an Irish cartographer and his son surveying the island in 1865 after the Great Famine, depicts haunting encounters with the verdant landscape, including its plentiful oozing bogs.
SELLING OPPORTUNITY: The Story of Mary Kay, by Mary Lisa Gavenas
Mary Kay, the cosmetics company whose multilevel marketing included sales parties and whose biggest earners were awarded pink Cadillacs, was really in the business of selling second chances. Or, at least, that’s what Mary Lisa Gavenas argues in “Selling Opportunity,” a dual biography of the brand and the woman behind it.
Mary Kathlyn Wagner, who would become Mary Kay Ash, “the most famous saleswoman in the world” and “maybe the most famous ever,” in Gavenas’s extravagant words, was born in 1918 to a poor family and raised mostly in Houston. Although a good student, she eloped at 16 with a slightly older boy. The young couple had two babies in quick succession.
Mary Kay’s creation was a combination of timing and good luck. Door-to-door sales was a thriving industry — but, traditionally, a man’s world: Lugging heavy samples was not considered feminine, and entering the homes of strangers, unsafe. But things began to change during the Great Depression, Gavenas suggests, thanks to a convergence of factors — financial pressures and the rise of the aspirational prosperity gospel espoused by Dale Carnegie’s self-help manuals.
At the same time, female-run beauty lines like Annie Turnbo Malone’s Poro and Madam C.J. Walker’s were finding great success in Black communities. And, coincidentally or otherwise, the California Perfume Company changed its name to Avon Products in 1939.
Ash began by selling books door to door, moving on to Stanley Home Products in the 1940s. She was talented, but direct sales was a rough gig. Every party to show off wares was supposed to beget two more bookings; these led to sales that resulted in new recruits. But there was no real security or stability: no salary, no medical benefits, no vacations. “Stop selling and you would end up right back where you started. Or worse,” the author writes.
Gavenas, a onetime beauty editor who wrote “Color Stories,” takes her time unspooling Mary Kay’s tale, with a great deal of evident research. We learn about direct sales, women’s rights and Texas history.
But, be warned: Readers must really enjoy both this woman and this world to take pleasure in “Selling Opportunity.” Mary Kay the person keeps marrying, getting divorced or widowed and working her way through various sales jobs (it’s hard to keep track of the myriad companies and last names). Gavenas seems to leave no detail out. Thus, the 1963 founding of the eponymous beauty company doesn’t come until almost 200 pages in.
Beauty by Mary Kay included a Cleansing Cream, a Magic Masque and a Nite Cream (which containined ammoniated mercury, later banned by the F.D.A.). The full line of products — which was how Mary Kay strongly encouraged customers to buy them — ran to a steep $175 in today’s money. (To fail to acquire the whole set, Ash said, was “like giving you my recipe for chocolate cake but leaving out an important ingredient.”)
Potential clients attended gatherings at acquaintances’ homes — no undignified doorbell-ringing here — where they received a mini facial, then an application of cosmetics like foundation, lip color and cream rouge — and a wig. The company made $198,514 in sales its first year.
Although Ash may have seemed a pioneer, in many ways Mary Kay was a traditionalist company, whose philosophy was “God first, family second, career third.” Saleswomen, official literature dictated, were working to provide themselves with treats rather than necessities so as not to threaten their breadwinner husbands.
And yet, they were also encouraged to sell sell sell. Golden Goblet pendants were awarded for major orders. After the company started using custom pink Peterbilt trucks for shipping, it began commissioning those Cadillacs for top consultants. (Mary Kay preferred gifts to cash bonuses, lest women save the money to spend on practical things rather than the licensed frivolities.) The Cadillacs, always driven on company leases, would become industry legend and part of American pop culture lore. “Never to be run-down, repainted or resold, the cars would double as shining pink advertisements for her selling opportunity,” Gavenas writes.
The woman herself was iconic, too. While Ash was a product of the Depression, she was also undeniably over-the-top. She wore white suits with leopard trim, lived in a custom Frank L. Meier house and brought her poodle to the office.
Mary Kay went public in 1968, making her the first woman to chair a company on the New York Stock Exchange. By the 1990s, the Mary Kay headquarters near Dallas was almost 600,000 square feet. They commissioned a hagiographic company biopic; there was a Mary Kay consultant Barbie; they were making $1 billion in wholesale. When she died, in 2001, Ash was worth $98 million.
And yet, Gavenas cites that at the company’s height, in 1992, sales reps made on average just $2,400 per year.
Instead of so much time in the pink fantasia of Mary Kay, it would have been nice for a few detours showing how infrequently the opportunities the company sold were truly realized.
SELLING OPPORTUNITY: The Story of Mary Kay | By Mary Lisa Gavenas | Viking | 435 pp. | $35
We often think of the past as if it were another world — and in some ways, it is. The politics, religion and social customs of other eras can be vastly different from our own. But one thing historians and historical fiction writers alike often notice is the constancy of human emotion. The righteous anger of a customer complaining about a Mesopotamian copper merchant in 1750 B.C. feels familiar. Tributes to beloved household pets from ancient Romans and Egyptians make us smile. And we are captivated by stories of love, betrayal and sacrifice from Homer to Shakespeare and beyond.
In literature, letters, tablets and even on coins, we find overwhelming evidence that people in the past felt the same emotions we do. Love, hate, fear, grief, joy: These feelings were as much a part of their lives as they are of our own. And they resonate especially acutely in the bond between mother and child. Here are eight historical novels that explore the meaning of motherhood across the centuries.
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