• Atlanta selected the Washington QB with No 8 pick in the draft
• Cousins signed $180m contract with Falcons this offseason

The Atlanta Falcons provided the shock of the first round of the NFL draft by selecting quarterback Michael Penix Jr with the No 8 overall pick on Thursday night.

The Falcons extended their recent trend of selecting offensive skill players in the first round by drafting Penix one month after signing Kirk Cousins to a four-year, $180m contract with $100m guaranteed. Using a draft slot normally targeted for players expected to make an immediate impact, the Falcons picked Penix as the apparent long-term successor to the 35-year-old Cousins.

The Falcons had been expected to use the pick to boost their pass rush.

The Falcons also focused on offensive playmakers with their last three first-round picks. Tight end Kyle Pitts was the No 4 overall pick in 2021, followed by wide receiver Drake London and running back Bijan Robinson, each No 8, the last two years.

Penix, who will be 24 as a rookie, led FBS schools with 4,903 passing yards and was third with 36 touchdown passes at Washington in 2023. He won the Maxwell Award as the nation’s top player.

Mike McCarthy, Cousins’ agent, said the quarterback was ‘surprised’ by the selection. “Yes, it was a big surprise,” McCarthy told NFL Network. “We had no idea this was coming. The truth is the whole league had no idea this was coming. We got no heads up. Kirk got a call from the Falcons when they were on the clock. That was the first we heard. It never came up in any conversation.”

• Caleb Williams, Jayden Daniels, Drake Maye tipped for top three
• Chicago Bears to make first overall draft pick at 8pm ET
• High demand and supply set to create a glut of first-round QBs
• Send Oliver a tweet at @OllieConnolly at or email him

This is Detroit’s first time hosting the league’s annual carnival. And they’re doing things in a typically Detroit style. How about Dan Campbell as a ‘Grit and Glory’ fortune teller?

If you can’t be in Detroit to hang out with Campbell, you can catch the draft here:

US: 5pm, NFL Network/ABC

UK: 1am, Sky Sports Main Event

Australia: 10am, ESPN

• Bears unveil $5bn proposal for new domed lakefront stadium
• Plan calls for $900m from Illinois Sports Facilities Authority

The Chicago Bears unveiled a nearly $5bn proposal Wednesday for an enclosed stadium next door to their current home at Soldier Field as part of a major project that would transform the city’s lakefront, and they are asking for public funding to help make it happen.

The plan calls for $3.2bn for the new stadium plus an additional $1.5bn in infrastructure. The team and the city said the project would add green and open space while improving access to the city’s Museum Campus and could also include a publicly owned hotel.

Our writers take a look at the best prospects coming out of college, and which teams needs to nail their picks over the coming days

It feels like a lock that it will be LSU’s Jayden Daniels , thought I wouldn’t put it past the Commanders to fall in love with Michigan’s JJ McCarthy . Daniels is a funky prospect; he was a starry duel threat at LSU, but it’s tough to see whether the best elements of his game – his running, his deep ball – will smoothly transition to the NFL. He doesn’t possess Lamar Jackson-esque breakaway speed and has a brittle frame. As a thrower from the pocket, he has a snappy delivery but struggles to shift to his second and third reads. There is some RGIII to his game. Do Washington really want to tread that path again? OC

The franchise has long been dismissed as backwards looking. But it is set to draft a star who happily pushes back on athlete stereotypes

Among the NFL’s heirloom franchises, the Chicago Bears are the still living in the last century – the pride of George “Papa Bear” Halas, a league founding father. From their neoclassical stadium to their 101-year-old owner-matriarch to their stubborn reverence for “Bear Weather” (ie: lake-effect winter conditions that only affect the other team), everything about the franchise is old-fashioned. Even the Bears being in position to select a quarterback with the first pick in this month’s draft has arrived about 30 years too late in a league where the passing game dominates. What’s notable is that the passer in their sights isn’t the second-coming of 1940s hero Sid Luckman or a Harvard man or some other statuesque golden boy. It’s Caleb Williams, Gen Z’s poster boy quarterback.

On paper, Williams would appear to possess precisely the resume that Virginia McCaskey, the owner-matriarch in question, might describe as “the cat’s pajamas.” He went to USC – a college football program that Chicagoland’s many Notre Dame fans at least respect. He won the Heisman trophy, putting him in a league with early Bears two-way star Johnny Lujack. And Williams played most of his college games in the LA Memorial Coliseum, one of the few stadiums left that can rival Soldier Field’s antiquity – so he shouldn’t be a snob about the patchy quality of the Bears natural home turf.

Malcolm LaVergne, executor of Simpson’s estate, says ‘hard no’ to brain being given to study effects of playing in NFL

A lawyer who represented OJ Simpson said there were no plans to donate the former NFL player’s brain to science and that his body would be cremated.

Simpson, who became the subject of an intense national debate in America after he was accused – and cleared – of the 1994 murder of his ex-wife Nicole Brown Simpson and her friend Ron Goldman, died last week aged 76. He was later found liable for the two killings in a civil case.

• Executor of Simpson estate to fight payout of $33.5m judgment
• Simpson was found liable in civil trial after criminal acquittal

The executor of OJ Simpson’s estate says he will work to prevent a payout of a $33.5m judgment awarded by a California civil jury nearly three decades ago in a wrongful death lawsuit filed by the families of Simpson’s ex-wife Nicole Brown Simpson and her friend Ron Goldman.

Simpson’s will was filed Friday in a Clark County court in Nevada, naming his longtime lawyer, Malcolm LaVergne, as the executor. The document shows Simpson’s property was placed into a trust that was created this year.

Have you been following the big stories in football, golf, cricket, horse racing, athletics, basketball, NFL and UFC?

The death of the once-loved NFL star and actor leaves a trail of wreckage from his tabloid notoriety as double murder suspect

• OJ Simpson, ex-NFL star who was acquitted of murder, dies aged 76
• OJ Simpson’s life from NFL stardom to legal jeopardy – in pictures

Before he was the world’s most infamous murder suspect, OJ Simpson did not have a reputation for killer performances. David Zucker, the director of the 1988 comedy classic The Naked Gun, only hired the Buffalo Bills great for the ironic potential. Which is to say he was a massive celebrity who could be had for cheap.

Zucker’s hope was that Simpson would prove to be at least as serviceable as Kareem Abdul-Jabbar had been in their previous film, Airplane!, which saw the basketball legend lean even further into his acerbic streak. But Simpson proved to be so much more as Detective Nordberg, a Wile E Coyote figure in a live-action cartoon. For those of us born well after Simpson won the 1968 Heisman trophy or became the first player in NFL history to top the 2,000-yard rushing mark in 1973, the ultimate highlight is him as Nordberg creeping onto a house boat full of heroin pushers and suffering every manner of physical harm before landing face-first into a wedding cake and falling overboard. And just like Wile E, it didn’t matter how many times Nordberg launched down a flight of stairs or folded in half, he always managed to bounce back in time for a sequel film.