On Friday the anniversary falls in the middle of the opening week of the season. The league will mark it in every stadium. It is worth understanding why it marks it so seriously, and the answer goes back not to 2001 but to 1963.
Twenty-five years ago this Friday, four hijacked aircraft were used to kill 2,977 people in New York, at the Pentagon and in a field in Pennsylvania. This is a football magazine and it will stay in its lane. But the National Football League made a decision that week which is still the reference point for how American sport answers a catastrophe, and it made that decision because of one it had got wrong thirty-eight years earlier.
1963, and the worst decision he ever made
President Kennedy was shot in Dallas on Friday 22 November 1963. Pete Rozelle, then thirty-seven and not quite four years into the job, had a full Sunday schedule two days later and had to decide what to do with it.
He rang Pierre Salinger, Kennedy’s press secretary and a friend from university, and was told the president would have wanted the games to go ahead. Rozelle played all seven.
What happened next is the part worth sitting with. The networks did not carry the football. CBS, the league’s own broadcaster, stayed with the assassination; and at 11.21 that morning in Dallas, thirty-nine minutes before the first kick-offs, NBC’s viewers watched Lee Harvey Oswald being shot dead on live television. CBS had the tape on air within the minute. The stadiums, meanwhile, were full.
Three decades later Rozelle admitted the mistake — “obviously, it was a mistake”, he told the New York Times — and the line that has followed him ever since is that it was the worst decision he ever made. It is the reason the sport thinks about these things at all.
Honesty requires a footnote. Those close to Rozelle have said that privately he never really believed he had been wrong — that what embarrassed him was the reaction rather than the choice. Both things can be true. A commissioner can regret a decision publicly for thirty years and still think, quietly, that he understood something the critics did not.
2001, and the man who had five days
Paul Tagliabue had been commissioner for almost twelve years when the aircraft hit. The second week of the 2001 season was due to be played on Sunday 16 September. He had five days, and he had Rozelle.
He called the week off. It was the first weekend of NFL football wiped from the calendar since the players’ strike of 1987, and unlike a strike there was no negotiation to point at, no leverage, nothing to be gained. The games were not abandoned — they were replayed on the first weekend of January and the season ran a week longer — but it cost the league a week of revenue and a great deal of logistical grief, and it pushed the Super Bowl into February for the first time in its history.
That is the part people forget. The first February Super Bowl in the league’s history happened because of that week.
There is a smaller story from those days that says more than the decision does. A lawyer at the league office lost his wife in the attacks. Tagliabue went with him to Mass at St Patrick’s Cathedral, a few streets from the NFL’s own building. No announcement, no statement. It is the detail that turns an institutional judgement into a human one.
Tagliabue died on 9 November 2025, aged eighty-four. This is the first anniversary of the attacks without the man who decided what the league would do about them.
What the league is doing this week
The commemoration runs across the whole of Week 1 rather than a single fixture, which is itself a choice: the anniversary falls on a Friday, between the Wednesday opener and the Sunday programme.
Never Forget will be stencilled in the end zone at every Week 1 venue, alongside commemorative stadium branding, with tributes to first responders and military families at every Week 1 game. Officials will use a tribute-branded coin for the toss, and the coins will be auctioned afterwards for 9/11 charities.
The Giants host Dallas on Sunday night, and players, coaches and staff from both teams will wear NYPD, FDNY and Port Authority caps on the sideline and Never Forget shirts in the warm-up. The NFL Foundation, in partnership with the Giants, the Jets and the Commanders — the three clubs closest to the three sites — is making a joint $1 million contribution to the National September 11 Memorial & Museum, and the Foundation is directing a further $250,000 to the charity 9/11 Day.
NFL Films premieres an episode of NFL Films Presents on Wednesday, on FS1 and its own YouTube channel, built around personal accounts rather than archive: the Eagles’ general manager Howie Roseman, Gary Bulger, a retired New York City firefighter, and Jonathan Reiss, a lifelong fan of the game.
And in Melbourne, at the league’s first regular-season game in Australia, there will be a field-sized flag carried by American and Australian service personnel, and a ceremony at the Shrine of Remembrance. Whatever one makes of a league exporting its own commemoration, it is at least being done at a war memorial rather than in a marketing slot.
Nobody on the field remembers
Here is the fact that makes this anniversary different from the last twenty-four.
Only one of the thirty-two players taken in this year’s first round was alive when it happened. Fernando Mendoza, the first pick in April’s draft, was not born until 2003. Neither Caleb Downs nor Jeremiyah Love had been born either. The exception is Akheem Mesidor, taken twenty-second by the Chargers, who was five months old that morning — alive for it, and no closer to remembering it than the other thirty-one. For them it is what the Somme is to a British twenty-two-year-old: real, serious, and entirely second-hand.
A handful of men in the league do remember. Aaron Rodgers, who starts the season at forty-two, was seventeen and in his last year of high school. Kirk Cousins, who starts for Las Vegas at thirty-eight, was thirteen. Aaron Donald, back from retirement at thirty-five, was ten. That is close to the whole of it. In the coaching ranks and the front offices there are plenty who watched it as adults; on the field there is almost nobody.
This is what happens to every act of remembrance eventually. The people who were there stop being the people doing the remembering. It is why the Cenotaph still has a parade a century on, and why the parade is not less serious for being made up of people who were not born.
Why it is worth doing properly
There is a version of this in which none of it means very much: a decal, a coin, a stencil in an end zone, a moment of quiet before a television advertisement. Sport is very good at borrowing gravity it has not earned, and a league that sells everything else will sell this too.
The defence is the 1963 comparison. Rozelle played, and spent the rest of his life saying he should not have. Tagliabue did not play, and it is one of the two or three things he is remembered for. Between those two men the league worked out that there are days when the correct response to a national catastrophe is to stop, and that a sport with this much cultural weight cannot pretend it is only a game when it suits it to be.
On Friday there will be no football. The anniversary sits in the gap between the Wednesday opener and the Sunday programme, which is roughly where it belongs: not competing with the games, not ignored by them.
Twenty-five years ago the league decided that some weeks you do not play. That is the whole of what it has to say, and it is enough.
Sources: Sports Illustrated (Rozelle’s 1963 decision, Pierre Salinger’s advice, Joe Browne on what Rozelle privately believed, and the 1pm Eastern kick-off thirty-nine minutes after Oswald was shot); the Warren Commission report (the 11.21am Dallas time of the shooting); Flashback Dallas and American Heritage (NBC carrying it live and CBS following on tape); Sports Broadcast Journal, quoting the New York Times, for Rozelle’s own words; Pro-Football-Reference (the seven NFL games of 24 November 1963 and the 2026 first round); Chargers.com (Akheem Mesidor); NBC News and NFL.com (Paul Tagliabue’s death on 9 November 2025 and his 9/11 decision); Sports Illustrated again for Ed Tighe and St Patrick’s Cathedral; Wikipedia (the postponed games replayed on 6–7 January 2002, and the dates of Super Bowls XXXVI, XXXVII and XXXVIII); the NFL’s own commemoration announcement as carried by Yahoo Sports and the Van Nuys News Press, and therams.com for the Melbourne ceremony. The death toll of 2,977 is the figure recorded by the National September 11 Memorial & Museum. Every figure re-checked against source on 3 September 2026.