Football is back, or at least close enough that people are already arguing about depth charts.
NFL rookies begin reporting to training camps this week, veterans will follow and every fanbase will soon convince itself that a third-string receiver is about to become a household name. All 32 teams are scheduled to be in camp by July 28.
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.
The series gives viewers the access they came for: injuries, family dynamics, sideline arguments and the impossible psychological experience of having millions of strangers judge every decision you make. What it doesn’t spend much time exploring is something several of its subjects have discussed elsewhere: faith.
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.
Christianity in the NFL is hardly new. Chapels and team Bible studies have been part of locker rooms for decades. What’s changing is how publicly players are willing to discuss the substance of their faith. The conversation is moving beyond thanking God after a win. Players are talking about repentance and identity before anyone asks.
Cam Ward entered the league with the kind of story sports media usually turns into a motivational poster. He went from a zero-star high school recruit to Incarnate Word, then Washington State, Miami and finally the No. 1 pick in the 2025 NFL Draft.
Ward has never treated that journey as proof that he can control every outcome.
“You never know where football is going to take you and you never know what God has in store for you,” he said before the draft. His summary of his rise was even simpler: “All you have to do is believe in God and work. Those two things will take care of everything.”
When Tennessee selected him first overall, Ward fought back tears.
“I’ve got to thank God,” he said. “The hard work that I put myself through and the unbelievable work ethic that I have, I just always had faith.”
There is confidence in Ward’s language, but it isn’t the kind that assumes faith guarantees a smooth career. His rookie season was difficult. Tennessee won three games, Ward took a league-high 55 sacks and the franchise entered another offseason searching for stability around him.
His story now becomes more interesting. It’s easy to credit God while holding up a No. 1 jersey. Faith looks different when the rebuilding process takes longer than expected.
Mayfield understands that tension better than most. He entered the NFL as the No. 1 pick in 2018, became the face of the Cleveland Browns and then watched his career unravel publicly, traded, released and passed around the league before he found a home in Tampa Bay.
Mayfield has said his relationship with God began deepening much earlier, during a turbulent period at Oklahoma.
“I grew up in a household who would go to church twice a year,” Mayfield said. “I believed but wasn’t truly walking the walk.”
After what he described as a “crash and burn,” Mayfield built a relationship with a local pastor who helped him stop pretending everything was fine. Faith didn’t rebuild his reputation. It gave him something to stand on once the reputation was gone.
Mayfield’s career eventually offered a very public test of that idea. When football stopped delivering the approval he’d grown accustomed to, he had to decide what remained.
It’s a recurring theme in this wave of NFL faith. Christianity isn’t presented as an extra ingredient in a success strategy. For many of these players, it becomes most meaningful when the strategy fails.
New England Patriots running back TreVeyon Henderson arrived in the league with little ambiguity about what mattered most to him. During his final season at Ohio State, he regularly used interviews and social media to talk about Jesus, and the openness followed him into New England, including conversations inside the Patriots organization about the responsibility that comes with sharing personal convictions publicly.
Forwe 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.”
Watson eventually became someone teammates approached for prayer, discipleship and baptism. He also became known for speaking about racial justice and abortion. He talked about the moral responsibilities Christians carry outside the stadium too.
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.
Kirk Cousins represents the longer view.
Cousins has discussed Christianity throughout his NFL career, but his language has matured alongside it. He speaks less about faith as a source of competitive confidence now and more about stewardship — what a person should do with money, visibility and influence that never truly belonged to them.
As a teenager, Cousins heard International Justice Mission founder Gary Haugen speak about human trafficking. On the way home, he prayed that God would someday give him enough resources to support the work.
Years later, after NFL contracts and Pro Bowls, Cousins and his wife, Julie, became longtime IJM supporters.
“God’s given us all resources,” Cousins said. “For me, it’s just about where do I see God leading me or opening doors or stirring my heart or introducing me to organizations or issues or causes.”
Cousins has experienced nearly every version of an NFL career: overlooked prospect, surprise starter, highly paid free agent, injured veteran and displaced franchise quarterback. Through it all, his faith has given him a framework for asking a better question than whether the season went according to plan: what was he supposed to do with what he’d been given?
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.
As another season begins, Ward is trying to establish himself, Mayfield is chasing a remarkable second act, Henderson is finding his footing in New England and Cousins is nearing the end of a career that rarely went according to plan.
Their circumstances are different. The question beneath them is the same: Who are you when football can no longer tell you who you are?