The Sunday spread is a format. Stop styling it like a commercial.

Football food is a holding pattern with napkins. The job is to survive three windows without turning the table into a project. Heat that can sit. Salt that does not require a speech. A store salad that nobody needs to lie about. The failures arrive dressed as ambition: a smoked thing that makes the host a lecturer, a board that photographs well and feeds no one during a two-minute warning.

September 13 is the first Sunday the form is back in rotation. Treat it like the cookout rule with a remote. One thing cooked on purpose. Cold drinks. A table that can be ignored when the play starts. If it tastes like a commercial, it lost.

Hot, simple, edible during a third-and-long. Anything that needs a plated explanation can wait for a night without a snap.