Forget the predictions; Week 1 was full of surprises

	Ray Lewis, back after missing the last 10 games of 2005 with a hamstring injury, led a punishing Ravens defense in their 27-0 win over the Buccaneers. US Presswire
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NEW YORK -- The moral of Week 1's story: NFL teams never, ever, ever pick up exactly where they left off the previous year.

I was in the NBC viewing room on the fifth floor of Rockefeller Center on Sunday afternoon, working for the Peacock and monitoring the nine 1 o'clock games. That's when it started: Buffalo handling New England, and Tom Brady playing like his old teammate at Michigan, Drew Henson. Seattle getting pulverized -- and I mean really beaten up -- in Detroit. Atlanta taking it to Carolina, with Mike Vick, public be damned, playing how he wants to play and forgetting how all of the so-called football brains want him to play. The Saints, after their horrific summer, playing like the Mora Saints in Cleveland. The Chiefs looking moribund on offense and the Bengals looking dynastic on defense -- both in the same game. Denver. Yeccch. Losing to the Rams, who looked like contenders for the first time in a couple of years.

And the Ravens. My God, is it possible they looked better than the 2000 Ravens? Winning 27-zip at Tampa, a team everyone loved 24 hours ago.

"What we have here right now,'' Ray Lewis told me from the Ravens' team plane after the game, "is the unity we had in 2000, and an offense like we haven't had here.''

There was revelry around Lewis, the happy sound of winners.

"I'll tell you one thing,'' Lewis said. "We will be very, very hard to beat this year.''

I buy it. It's only one week, and I have no idea if Steve McNair can stay healthy, but I totally buy it.

OK, a quick detour. My life in this business changed Sunday. I've been at a different stadium, covering an NFL game, every Sunday in the fall since 1984. My duties with NBC have me inside the studio now, watching games and then chasing the news from what happens in the games. So Sunday afternoon I sat in the viewing room with the stars of the show -- Bob Costas, Cris Collinsworth, Sterling Sharpe and Jerome Bettis -- and went crazy watching a giant square box of electronics with nine square TVs, one for every game. Sterling howls a lot. And he's opinionated. Well, we all are. But it was a fun day. Different, but fun. I really missed being in a stadium and cornering the star of the day afterward to find out what really happened. But it's a new world, and I'll enjoy it.

My biggest observation of the day, particularly from the nine early games: The first week of the NFL is always the most mysterious, because you don't know from the preseason what you're going to get. You don't see enough in the preseason to know. But now we've got some knowledge. Here's what we learned: