The following is excerpted from an online article posted by Relevant
Football is back, or at least close enough that people are already arguing about depth charts.
Netflix has helped accelerate the annual return of football brain. The latest season of Quarterback, which follows Cam Ward, Baker Mayfield, Joe Flacco and Jayden Daniels through the 2025 season, dropped just as teams began preparing for another year.
Ward and Mayfield are part of a generation of players talking about Christianity with a directness that feels increasingly common across football. TreVeyon Henderson has joined them, while veterans like Kirk Cousins and former tight end Benjamin Watson have spent years showing what that faith can look like beyond a postgame sound bite.
NFL star Benjamin Watson has been watching that kind of openness spread across football for years. He spent 16 seasons in the NFL and remembers how relentlessly the league turns human beings into weekly performance reports.
“The NFL is a place where every single day you’re judged on performance,” Watson told RELEVANT. “Early in my career, I dealt with perfectionism. God really taught me about grace — His grace, and the grace I needed to give myself. That perspective shaped everything.”
His faith wasn’t restricted to personal inspiration. It shaped how he thought about public life.
Watson believes social media created the current moment. Players no longer have to wait for a broadcaster to ask the right question — they can share a Scripture passage or talk directly about Jesus on their own platforms. When one respected athlete does it, others feel less isolated.
There’s no statistical measure proving the NFL is experiencing a revival. The league remains complicated, commercial and often brutal. Public declarations of faith can be sincere or performative, and a Bible verse in an Instagram caption doesn’t tell anyone how a player treats teammates once the cameras leave.
Something real is happening anyway. Players are describing faith as something that confronts their ambition rather than fuels it, and that shift shows up in how they talk about identities built on draft position, contracts and applause.