The Matchup at a Glance
- Who: New England Patriots (2025: 14-3, AFC Champions) at Seattle Seahawks (2025: 14-3, Super Bowl LX Champions)
- When: Wednesday, September 9, 2026 – 8:20 p.m. ET / 5:20 p.m. PT
- Where: Lumen Field, Seattle, Washington
- TV/Streaming: NBC, Peacock, NFL+
- All-time series: Seahawks lead 12-9 overall (11-8 regular season, 1-1 postseason)
Seven months after the confetti fell in Santa Clara, the NFL is handing football fans the rematch nobody could have scripted any better. The Seattle Seahawks and New England Patriots will run it back on opening night of the 2026 season, with the champion Seahawks hosting the team they dismantled in Super Bowl LX. It’s the first time since 2012 that the league has opened its season on a Wednesday, and only the third time in NFL history – joining the 1970 Vikings-Chiefs and 2016 Broncos-Panthers openers – that the two teams from the previous Super Bowl have squared off again in Week 1. Before a snap is played, Seattle will raise its second Lombardi Trophy banner over Lumen Field, with the team it took the banner from standing on the opposite sideline.
Betting Odds: What the Books Are Saying
The sportsbooks have treated this like a marquee event since the schedule leaked months ago, and the number has moved only modestly since. The mainstream U.S. market – books like DraftKings, FanDuel and BetMGM – opened Seattle as a 3.5-to-4.5-point favorite and has largely settled at Seahawks -3.5, with the total holding steady at 44.5 points and moneylines in the neighborhood of Seahawks -185 to -195 and Patriots +155 to +165.
The offshore market, where Bovada Sports and Bookmaker both operate, has consistently priced Seattle a bit stronger than that mainstream number:
- Bovada Sports has the Seahawks as 4-point favorites, with the Patriots getting +4 at -115 – meaning Bovada wants a touch more juice to take New England to cover, a sign it’s seen more square money coming in on the Patriots side of that number. The total sits in line with the rest of the market at 44.5.
- Bookmaker, grouped alongside Bovada and BetOnline as one of the market’s established offshore sportsbooks, has similarly kept Seattle toward the higher end of the board, in the -4 to -4.5 range with the total also at 44.5 – essentially mirroring where Bovada and other sharp offshore shops have landed rather than the slightly lower number posted by the regulated domestic books.
Worth noting: this is effectively the same number the Seahawks closed at for Super Bowl LX itself (-4.5 on a neutral field), which means the market is pricing in Seattle’s home-field advantage as being largely offset by New England’s offseason additions. Prediction markets tell a similar story – Kalshi has had Seattle’s moneyline trading in the 63-to-65-cent range, and Polymarket has priced the spread at close to a coin flip against the number, with Seattle’s outright win probability sitting in the mid-60s. As always with lines this far in advance of kickoff, expect movement as roster cuts, practice reports and injury news roll in over the next two weeks – bettors should confirm current numbers before wagering.
How We Got Here: Reliving Super Bowl LX
New England and Seattle both finished the 2025 regular season 14-3, and both looked every bit like it in the playoffs. The Patriots survived a snowy, defensive slugfest in Denver to beat the Broncos 10-7 in the AFC Championship Game. The Seahawks needed a furious finish to hold off the Rams 31-27 in the NFC title game. It set up a Super Bowl billed as a genuine toss-up between two teams that ranked among the league’s best on both sides of the ball.
The game did not play out that way. Seattle’s defense, nicknamed the “Dark Side” throughout the playoff run, sacked Drake Maye six times, forced three turnovers, and kept the Patriots off the scoreboard until the fourth quarter of a 29-13 rout at Levi’s Stadium. Running back Kenneth Walker III bulldozed his way to 135 rushing yards and was named Super Bowl MVP, kicker Jason Myers set a Super Bowl record with five made field goals, and Sam Darnold turned in a mistake-free performance to cap a career-changing season in the Pacific Northwest. For New England, the loss capped a stunning first year under head coach Mike Vrabel, who had taken over a team that posted back-to-back four-win seasons and turned it into an AFC champion in a single offseason – a fact that made the Super Bowl beating sting, but didn’t erase the sense that the Patriots’ rebuild is ahead of schedule.
Seattle Seahawks: Defending the Throne
Mike Macdonald enters his third season in Seattle looking to become just the latest in a short line of coaches to repeat as Super Bowl champions, and he inherits a roster that mostly stayed intact even as the names around it changed. The Seahawks will once again break in a new play-caller – offensive coordinator Brian Fleury takes over after Klint Kubiak departed to become the Las Vegas Raiders’ head coach, marking the third different offensive coordinator of Macdonald’s three seasons at the helm. Defensive coordinator Aden Durde and special teams coordinator Jay Harbaugh both return.
The biggest subtraction is at running back, where Super Bowl MVP Kenneth Walker III left in free agency to sign with Kansas City. Seattle also said goodbye to depth pieces Kenny McIntosh, Dareke Young, Boye Mafe, Riq Woolen and Coby Bryant. In Walker’s place, the Seahawks used their first-round pick (No. 32 overall) on Notre Dame running back Jadarian Price, an efficient, big-play threat who profiles as the early favorite to lead the backfield, while Zach Charbonnet works his way back from a torn ACL and could open the year on the physically unable to perform list.
Where Seattle didn’t take a step back is at the skill positions that matter most in the passing game. Jaxon Smith-Njigba enters the season as the reigning NFL Offensive Player of the Year after leading the league in receiving yards, and the Seahawks added proven veteran Cooper Kupp to a receiving corps that also includes deep threat Rashid Shaheed. Defensively, this is still very much Seattle’s identity: cornerback Devon Witherspoon signed a lucrative extension to stay a cornerstone piece, edge rusher Derick Hall is in line for a bigger role after setting career highs a year ago, and defensive tackle Leonard Williams inked a three-year, $90 million deal to anchor the interior. Punter Michael Dickson, a second-team All-Pro, and record-setting kicker Myers round out a special teams unit that has been a quiet strength of this era of Seahawks football.
Off the field, the Seahawks have been the subject of HBO’s “Hard Knocks” cameras throughout training camp, and a pending sale of the franchise looms in the background, with reported valuations in the $7-8 billion range. On it, the story is simple: with Darnold entering his second season as the unquestioned starter and most of a championship defense back intact, Seattle believes it has the pieces to become the first repeat champion in several years.
New England Patriots: Chasing Redemption
If Seattle’s story is continuity, New England’s is urgency. The Patriots spent their offseason trying to solve the exact problem that got exposed on the sport’s biggest stage: protection up front. New England allowed 47 sacks during the 2025 regular season and then were taken down at a rate that set the NFL record for most sacks allowed in a single playoff run during their three-game postseason march, a total blown out by the six-sack beating Seattle’s front delivered in the Super Bowl itself. To address it, New England is turning left guard over to Alijah Vera-Tucker, a big free-agent add from the Jets, while hoping for continued growth from young left tackle Will Campbell and adding pass-blocking rookie tackle Caleb Lomu for depth.
The headline move, though, came at wide receiver, where New England finally completed a long-rumored trade for A.J. Brown, reuniting the star receiver with Vrabel. Brown and free-agent addition Romeo Doubs give Drake Maye a dramatically upgraded receiving corps, even after the Patriots lost 2025 leading receiver Stefon Diggs. It’s a group that will need to gel quickly, since tight end Julian Hill was lost for the season to injury, leaving veteran Hunter Henry as the clear top target at the position with little proven depth behind him.
All of it is in service of protecting and building around Maye, who took the leap the Patriots hoped for in his second season. He finished as the league’s MVP runner-up and an All-Pro selection, throwing for more than 4,000 yards and 25 touchdowns while leading the NFL in completion percentage. Pro Football Focus graded him among the top ten quarterbacks in the league and credited him with one of the higher big-time-throw rates in football. New England is banking on a third season working with offensive coordinator Josh McDaniels to unlock even more.
On defense, the Patriots are breaking in a new coordinator without truly breaking in a new voice. Zak Kuhr, who called plays for most of the 2025 season while Terrell Williams battled and ultimately beat prostate cancer, has officially been elevated to defensive coordinator. Williams, now healthy, moves into an assistant head coach role rather than reclaiming his old job, keeping continuity in a defense that ranked among the league’s better units a year ago. One wrinkle worth watching: Vrabel held Maye and most of his starters out of virtually all of the 2026 preseason, citing concerns about the roster’s overall depth, which means Week 1 will be the first real look at several of New England’s new pieces working together under real conditions. Backup quarterback Behren Morton, rookie running back Jam Miller and pass rusher Gabe Jacas were among those who stood out when given preseason reps.
Keys to the Game
For Seattle: The pass rush that buried Maye in February needs to prove the Super Bowl wasn’t a ceiling performance, especially against a Patriots offensive line that spent the entire offseason being rebuilt specifically to answer that problem. Offensively, the questions are all about replacing Walker’s production – whether that’s rookie Jadarian Price handling a heavy workload right away or a recovering Charbonnet easing back in, Fleury’s first game as play-caller will be a crash course under a national spotlight.
For New England: Protecting Maye is the whole ballgame. If Vera-Tucker and the retooled interior can give him time, a receiving corps with Brown, Doubs and Boutte gives New England a level of firepower it didn’t have last February. The flip side is chemistry – with Brown getting almost no live preseason reps alongside Maye by design, Week 1 doubles as their real first date. Defensively, Kuhr’s unit will be tested immediately by a Seattle passing attack that returns its two best weapons in Smith-Njigba and Shaheed and adds a proven veteran in Kupp.
History Says…
The trends mostly point toward Seattle, though not as one-sidedly as the final score in February suggested. Since the NFL Kickoff Game became a standalone event in 2002, the defending Super Bowl champion has played in the opener all but one year since 2004 and carries a 16-5 record in those games. Seattle was also nearly unbeatable at Lumen Field a year ago, going 8-2 at home including the playoffs, outscoring opponents by better than 12 points per game there and covering the spread by an average of nearly a touchdown – both marks that ranked among the NFL’s best.
But there’s a countertrend, too: the only other time the Super Bowl’s two participants met again in the following Week 1 came in 2016, when the defending champion Broncos survived the runner-up Panthers by a single point after a missed field goal – a reminder that revenge-game emotion and a full offseason to make adjustments can turn a blowout into a nail-biter the second time around.
The Bottom Line
Both teams enter this one incomplete in different ways – Seattle replacing its Super Bowl MVP and its play-caller, New England unveiling a retooled offensive line and a superstar receiver with next to no live-game chemistry – which is exactly what makes an opener between two 14-3 teams worth the primetime billing. The number on the board suggests oddsmakers still see Seattle as the sharper, more finished product, but a Patriots team with a full offseason to study what went wrong in Santa Clara isn’t likely to be caught off guard twice. Either way, Lumen Field will be rocking for a banner-raising that doubles as a rematch – not a bad way to kick off 272 games of football.