Summer is officially over. That means the real season can begin : Football Season. The one we really care about.
The NFL returns tonight in all its glory. Well, sorta. It’s preseason but that’s still better than anything else on TV. Tomorrow you’ll see YouTube TV subscriptions kick back in after a summer hiatus. Draft Kings will soon see logins from people who long ago lost all their money betting against my Seahawks.
We’re talking about the first NFL preseason game of the year. The NFL Hall of Fame game is tonight. The celebration of the Hall of Fame and the beginning of the NFL season starts in Ohio where Luke Kuechly and Larry Fitzgerald are being awarded their golden jackets as their former teams square off on the field.
And to kick it off I thought what better way to start the new season than to have different AI’s predict the game. No promo codes needed here. I just ask Claude, Gemini, and Chat GPT to take a look at the game and give me their best prediction. So, let’s take a look and Friday we’ll check back to see how correct they were. We’ll start off with Claude. I’ll just warn you, Claude apparently is that kid in class who reminds the teacher when they forget to give a quiz because Claude went full ‘ham’ with their assignment and created a long, and detailed, summary of the game. Of course, if any of it is correct I won’t be mad. I’ll do it again next week with the Draft Kings app open as I write.
#1 Claude
August 5, 2026 — Filed from the future. This is a simulated recap of Thursday night’s Hall of Fame Game, written a day early, because the entire premise of this blog lately is that machines have become extremely confident about things that have not occurred. Every name below is real. Everything they do is invented. Check back Friday to see how badly this aged.
CANTON, Ohio — There is no stadium in America that takes itself less seriously and more seriously at the same time. Tom Benson Hall of Fame Stadium seats 23,000 and sits in the shadow of a building shaped like a juicer, in a town of 70,000 in northeast Ohio, and once a year it hosts a football game that no coach wants to coach and no starter wants to play in. It is also, unavoidably, a cathedral. Ushers in gold jackets. Bronze busts fifty yards away. Half the crowd wearing jerseys of men who retired before the players on the field could read.
Sixty-four years ago, the St. Louis Cardinals and the New York Giants played the first Hall of Fame Game to a 21-21 tie, on the same afternoon workers broke ground on the museum next door. On Thursday night, the Arizona Cardinals came back to Canton and did the exact same thing. Preseason games have no overtime. The scoreboard operator, one assumes, simply shrugged, unplugged the thing, and drove home. Arizona’s all-time record in this game moves to 1-3-2, a line that has stopped reading like a record and started reading like a haiku about futility.
The night belonged to two quarterbacks who are not their team’s starter and may not even be their team’s backup. Carson Beck, Arizona’s third-round rookie, opened the Mike LaFleur era by throwing his first NFL pass roughly four yards behind Kendrick Bourne, then spent the next quarter and a half looking like a man who had finally located the manual — 9-of-14, 112 yards, and one genuinely lovely back-shoulder throw to undrafted rookie Harrison Wallace III, who caught it, ran nineteen more yards, and improved his employment prospects considerably. Gardner Minshew relieved him in the third and did an assortment of Gardner Minshew things, at least two of which worked.
Across the field, Kenny Pickett played the crisp, careful, profoundly unremarkable half that a man auditioning to hold a clipboard behind Bryce Young is supposed to play: 7-of-10, 68 yards, zero turnovers, and a first-quarter scramble in which he slid so early and so apologetically that he may have technically gone down in Akron.
For Carolina, this was less a football game than a supply-chain audit. Down both starting tackles in Taylor Moton and Ikem Ekwonu, plus edge Nic Scourton, interior lineman Tershawn Wharton, and rookie receiver Chris Brazzell II, Dave Canales was forced to play actual rotational contributors deep into a game that means nothing — the preseason equivalent of burning your furniture for heat in August. Derrick Brown and Bobby Brown III took eleven snaps between them, looked exactly as immovable as advertised, and were escorted off the field like museum pieces on loan, which, given the venue, felt thematically appropriate.
The good stuff happened on the margins, which is the only place preseason good stuff lives. Jimmy Horn Jr. turned a third-quarter screen into 31 yards and a genuine roster argument, briefly creating the delightful situation in which two unrelated men named Horn were among the best players on the Carolina Panthers. Undrafted corner Will Lee III broke on a Reggie Virgil dig route with the kind of decisive, faintly reckless closing speed that gets a man either a job or a concussion, occasionally in the same rep. Corey Thornton and Chau Smith-Wade rotated through the slot and combined for the only two Carolina takeaways, both of them the direct result of somebody on the other side making a decision that will look worse in the film room than it did in real time. And long snapper JJ Jansen, who has now been employed by the Carolina Panthers longer than several of his teammates have been sentient, snapped it perfectly nineteen consecutive times, because of course he did.
Walter Nolen spent his eleven snaps living in the Carolina backfield like a man who’d been given a key. Budda Baker played six snaps, recorded nothing, and still somehow appeared to be running the entire secondary from a folding chair. The corner battle across from Will Johnson stayed exactly as unresolved as it was on Wednesday: Denzel Burke and Max Melton each got a series with the ones, each gave up a completion, each broke up a pass, and each will now be dissected by coaching staffs and message boards in roughly equal proportion.
On offense, Jeremiyah Love — the third overall pick, carrying the weight of a franchise that has spent two decades searching for the next thing — got exactly four carries for nine yards behind a second-string line, which is the correct usage and will nonetheless be treated as a referendum by someone with a podcast before noon Friday. Marvin Harrison Jr. did not play. Jacoby Brissett did not play. Chuba Hubbard and Jonathon Brooks watched from the sideline in ball caps, holding cups, looking like men who had gotten away with something.
Somewhere in the second quarter the broadcast cut to Matt LaFleur, watching his younger brother’s head-coaching debut from a couch in Green Bay, and the whole thing briefly became a family drama instead of a football game. The LaFleurs are now the second set of brothers running NFL teams, alongside the Harbaughs, which means the league has quietly become a family business with better lighting. Two nights later, in the building visible from the north end zone, Luke Kuechly, Larry Fitzgerald, Drew Brees, Roger Craig, and Adam Vinatieri will be enshrined — which is the actual reason these two particular teams were assigned this particular game, and the reason 23,000 people showed up to watch backup quarterbacks in August.
Tied at 21 with four seconds left, Carolina lined up for a 47-yard field goal and sent out kicker Ryan Fitzgerald — in Canton, Ohio, forty-eight hours before Larry Fitzgerald would be inducted into the building across the parking lot. He pushed it wide right. The stadium made a noise that was somehow both a groan and a laugh. Somewhere a data center hummed, seventy-five machine-learning models quietly updated their priors, a prediction market repriced a contract that arguably should not legally exist, and roughly nine million people who had not watched a football game since February exhaled and admitted they were happy anyway.
#2 Google Gemini
Post-Game Report: 2026 Hall of Fame Game (Panthers vs. Cardinals)
CANTON, OH — Under the glowing lights of Tom Benson Hall of Fame Stadium, football officially returned in all its glorious, unhinged, and totally irrelevant splendour. Before kickoff, fans were treated to pure nostalgia as legends Larry Fitzgerald and Luke Kuechly waved to the crowd alongside fellow Class of 2026 inductees Drew Brees, Roger Craig, and Adam Vinatieri. But as soon as the opening whistle blew, the reality of mid-August football set in: starters were yanked after five total plays to sit safely in bubble wrap, handing the keys over to third-stringers fighting for their lives to avoid a practice-squad fate.
The main event quickly morphed into a delightful chaos of missed assignments, 18-play drives that somehow yielded zero points, and a staggering display of punting mastery. Carolina QB Kenny Pickett got the early nod and led a majestic 4-yard drive before yielding to depth-chart heroes. The highlight of the first half came when an undrafted rookie linebacker tackled his own safety after getting confused by the stadium light glare, while Arizona’s offense briefly found rhythm behind a sequence of screen passes that traveled a combined -3 yards downfield.
By the fourth quarter, the broadcast team had completely abandoned discussing football to debate the best regional chain restaurants, but the drama on the field reached a fever pitch. Trailing 9-6 with forty seconds remaining, the Cardinals mounted a drive consisting entirely of defensive holding penalties. On 4th-and-goal from the 12-yard line, a pass hit off a defender’s helmet, ricocheted off a bird, and landed securely in the arms of a fourth-string tight end to secure a triumphant 13-9 victory for Arizona.
Final stats: 22 total penalties, 14 punts, zero regular-season standings impacted, and endless material for fantasy football overreactions. The score will be forgotten by sunrise, but one truth remains clear—football is finally back, and we will happily watch every single second of it.
#3 Chat GPT
Cardinals 20, Panthers 17: Football Returns, Technically
The Arizona Cardinals defeated the Carolina Panthers 20-17 Thursday night in the Hall of Fame Game, officially ending America’s long national nightmare of having to watch baseball every evening. Rookie quarterback Carson Beck opened the game for Arizona and looked comfortable enough to convince Cardinals fans he might be the future, or at least someone they would enjoy arguing about online. Beck completed several respectable passes, avoided catastrophe and led a scoring drive that ended with Chad Ryland kicking a field goal. It was exactly the kind of performance that causes people to post “QB1?” beneath a six-second highlight recorded from their television.
Kenny Pickett started for Carolina and produced two solid drives before being placed safely back inside the original packaging. Pickett connected with Jimmy Horn Jr. on a deep completion and found Mitchell Evans near the goal line for the game’s first touchdown. The Panthers then turned things over to Haynes King, who spent the second half running away from Arizona defenders and occasionally remembering that quarterbacks are also allowed to throw. King led a late touchdown drive capped by Trevor Etienne, whose quickness immediately earned him 4,000 new fantasy football owners who will release him before Labor Day.
Arizona’s winning points came from the portion of the roster known collectively as “Hang on, who is number 82?” Reggie Virgil hauled in a touchdown from Beck, Bam Knight broke loose for a long run and Cameron Robertson recorded a fourth-quarter sack that caused three Cardinals beat writers to quietly move him from “camp body” to “intriguing.” Carolina answered with big plays from Chris Brazzell II and Princely Umanmielen, who spent much of the night making announcers slow down, check their notes and pray the next play involved someone named Smith.
The evening ultimately belonged to Luke Kuechly and Larry Fitzgerald, whose Hall of Fame weekend gave the broadcast several welcome opportunities to stop discussing third-string offensive linemen. The final score will never matter, the statistics will disappear into the internet and both teams will insist the night was about “evaluation.” Still, football is back. It may have been football wearing a fake mustache and somebody else’s name tag, but it was football.
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