I was out Sunday at Soldier Field. Eating unhealthy food at 10 a.m. behind a tailgate is not a bad way to start the new season.

So I will leave it to others to weigh in on the ESPN debut of Ray Lewis on Countdown.

David Zurawik of the Baltimore Sun was impressed:

Overall, Lewis’ greatest contribution to ESPN’s “Sunday NFL Countdown” was the genuine sense of energy, enthusiasm and even joy that he brought to the conversation.

Last year, I thought the show felt flat and, frankly, kind of old. But not today. It was jacked up and juiced from beginning to end with energy, information and insights.

Lewis added to those insights with his keen understanding of the game.

For example, in talking about the pounding that the Ravens took Thursday night from the Denver Broncos, he said, ” “Baltimore will be fine. They’re that type of team, alright. Our pedigree has always been that.

“One stumble in the road ain’t never stopped nothing… In the first half the other night, they played checkers. You see? The second half, you was supposed to play chess.”

At first I thought, “OK, there’s the inscrutable Ray Lewis talking checkers and chess. What the hell does he mean by that, and how many hundreds of thousands of viewers did he just leave scratching their heads?”

But as he went on to explain how Broncos quarterback Peyton Manning reads defenses and how he would move Ravens players out of position to try and confuse Manning with disguised alignments, I thought, “That’s exactly what was going on in the second half: Manning started playing chess with the Ravens, and Baltimore had no one to play against him.”

That’s an astonishing insight. I think someone might have coached Lewis and told him he has to translates those kinds of insights into language that even the least football savvy viewer can understand.

Richard Deitsch at SI.com:

Clearly, Lewis is not a game-changing television hire at this point but he was more than adequate on opening morning. He’s got a charismatic manner and had moments where you drew closer to the screen to hear what he had to say. He was particularly interesting when explaining how to stop the read-option and the importance of New Orleans coach Sean Payton. “When that guy walks back in, that’s the brain of that operation,” Lewis said. “He is to New Orleans what Bill Belichick is to the Patriots. Without that, without him, you saw last year they had a great imbalance of what leadership looked like.”

However, both Deitsch and Bob Raissman of the New York Daily News note Lewis has to make a big change. Writes Raissman:

When referring to the Ravens on ESPN’s “Sunday NFL Countdown,” Ray Lewisused a lot of “we,” “our” and “us.”

Awful!

Whoever produces the show should have told him he is in the media now, not a player anymore. Then again, maybe those responsible for such duties are scared to mess with Mr. L.