RIO DE JANEIRO — The Maracanã has held World Cup finals. It has hosted an Olympic opening ceremony that electrified the entire planet. On Sunday, for the first time in the stadium’s 76-year history, someone is going to run a route, call a blitz, and spike a football on the same ground where Diego Maradona’s successors once played out their greatest moments.
This is the NFL’s first Rio de Janeiro game, and the league has bet heavily on Brazil’s appetite for American football. With an estimated 36 million fans across the country and a multi-year commitment to stage three games in the city over the next five years, the NFL is not treating Sunday like a curiosity. It is treating it like a launch. The Dallas Cowboys, designated home team, versus the Baltimore Ravens — Lamar Jackson’s dual-threat offence against Dak Prescott’s record-breaking arm, at a stadium that refuses to be anything less than historic.
Both teams arrive at 1-1, but their week-two journeys could not have been more different. The Ravens stumbled in New Orleans, absorbing a flat, disjointed loss after a strong opener that had the AFC North briefly thinking Baltimore was back in championship form. Dallas, by contrast, looked the part — a 37-20 win over Washington in which Dak Prescott threw himself into NFL history by becoming the Cowboys’ all-time leader in passing touchdowns. He enters Rio tied for the early season lead in TD passes with six, carrying an arm that has rarely looked more settled.
The field is the story no one wants to be the story. Heavy rain battered Rio in the days before the game, and the Maracanã surface, shared with Flamengo and used for soccer most of the year, drew pointed criticism from at least one Brazilian player during the week. NFL Field Director Nick Pappas offered the league’s official reassurance — no suspicions about Sunday’s playability — but the subtext was unmistakable: this surface is a wild card. For most quarterbacks, that is a minor inconvenience. For Lamar Jackson, it is a threat to everything that makes him devastating.
Jackson’s rushing ability defines Baltimore’s offence in ways that no scheme can fully replace. His cuts, his acceleration, the instinctive read between designed run and improvised scramble — all of it depends on traction. A wet, inconsistent surface does not merely make his runs harder. It changes the risk calculus for every play-action fake he runs, every bootleg he executes, every time he decides the lane is there. Fox Sports notes Dallas enters as the underdog here precisely because Lamar Jackson’s historical NFC record — 25-4 in career starts against the conference, including 14-1 on the road — makes the Cowboys uncomfortable regardless of surface.
What Dallas presents Jackson on Sunday is a third-down wall. The Cowboys have converted 68.2 per cent of their third downs through the first two weeks, leading the NFL — but more critically, they have been almost impossible to stop on those same situations against opposing offences. Their defensive pressure has made rhythm drives difficult all season. Ravens offensive coordinator Todd Monken will need Jackson moving from the pocket to break that rhythm, which brings the field question back to the centre of everything.
The wide receiver situation at Baltimore carries uncertainty. Zay Flowers, the Ravens’ leading receiver last season, entered the week as doubtful after a hamstring issue. A healthy Flowers changes the Ravens’ passing attack meaningfully — his route-running forces extra attention that every other receiver benefits from. Without him, Lamar Jackson will need to improvise more, require more movement, and rely more heavily on a surface that nobody has had the chance to fully trust yet.
Dak Prescott, meanwhile, has become something more than a Cowboys asset this season. He has become a category unto himself — a quarterback who has outlasted the franchise’s transitions and emerged, at 33, as one of the more credible arguments that elite quarterback play compounds with experience. His arm strength, his pre-snap reads, and his pocket management under pressure have all tightened from a year ago. Against a Ravens secondary that lost continuity in the offseason, Dak Prescott and CeeDee Lamb could find room in the intermediate game early.
According to NBC Sports, the Ravens enter as three-point favourites with expert predictions ranging from a 27-23 to a 31-27 Baltimore victory. The margin will likely come down to whether Lamar Jackson can move freely, whether Dak Prescott can sustain the third-down rhythm that has defined Dallas’s early season, and whether the Maracanã’s storied surface holds through sixty minutes of NFL football.
What it will not come down to is the occasion. More than 70,000 fans, a halftime featuring DJ Pedro Sampaio and Ricky Martin, and a stadium that has spent 76 years accumulating the weight of the world’s most consequential sporting moments — the occasion is settled. Sunday is the NFL’s clearest statement that it intends to stay in Rio de Janeiro. Whether the Ravens or Cowboys reward that ambition with something the Maracanã will want to remember is the only question remaining.
Kickoff is Sunday at 4:25 p.m. ET. The broadcast is on CBS and Paramount+.
