NFL 2026 Season

Seven months ago, the Seattle Seahawks beat the New England Patriots 29-13 at Levi’s Stadium to win Super Bowl LX. On Wednesday night, those same two teams meet again at Lumen Field to open the 2026 regular season. Rematches this fast are rare. What makes this one interesting is that neither team is the story heading into the year. That distinction belongs to a franchise that watched the whole thing from home. The Rams spent an offseason building a nightmare Los Angeles lost the NFC Championship Game to Seattle last January, then went out and fixed the one thing that beat them. Sean McVay’s team had almost no weaknesses in 2025 outside of corner play. They signed Trent McDuffie and Jaylen Watson to patch that. Then they traded for Myles Garrett, the reigning Defensive Player of the Year, pulling him out of Cleveland. Then, in late August, Aaron Donald came out of retirement on a one-year deal to rejoin the team two years after walking away. Sportsbooks reacted the way you’d expect. The Rams sit around +500 to win Super Bowl LXI, the shortest number on the board and comfortably clear of everyone else. ESPN’s Football Power Index gives them a 14.9% title chance, more than four percentage points ahead of the next team. There is a version of this that goes wrong. Cornerback play swings hard year to year, and Los Angeles almost certainly won’t repeat its 2025 offensive output. Matthew Stafford turns another year older. Aaron Donald at 35, after two seasons away, is a bet rather than a certainty. But on paper, no roster in football matches this one. Seattle is a better defending champion than most The Seahawks opened last season around +6000. Teams priced that long do not win Super Bowls, which is exactly why Seattle’s run mattered. The market now has them fourth at roughly +1100, with Sam Darnold back and most of the defense intact. FPI is more cautious, putting their repeat odds at 7.0%, less than half the Rams’. The reasoning is worth understanding: offense carries over from season to season far better than defense does. Seattle’s Super Bowl run was built on an elite unit, and Seattle’s defensive FPI rating has already slid from 4.6 at the end of last year to 2.1 now. That 2.1 is still the best mark in the league. The model is not saying Seattle got worse. It is saying that a year of unknowns has been added to a group that had none in February. The AFC has no clear favorite, and that’s the point Buffalo and Baltimore both sit around +1000. Kansas City is in the +1500 to +1700 range. New England, fresh off a Super Bowl appearance, opened +1500 and has drifted out toward +2000 with almost no betting support behind it. That spread of teams inside a narrow price band is a sign of genuine uncertainty. Denver is a name worth watching: the Broncos and Rams were the only two teams to finish top 10 in EPA per play on both offense and defense last season, and Denver’s number sits well behind what that suggests. Patrick Mahomes is the variable nobody can model Mahomes tore up his knee late last season. He missed the preseason. He has said he intends to go out in Week 1 and be himself. Nobody knows what that means yet, including Kansas City. A quarterback whose value has always come partly from off-schedule improvisation coming back from a serious knee injury is not a question a projection system answers well. The Chiefs’ entire ceiling sits on how his first month goes, and their price reflects hope more than evidence. The NFC West is a bloodbath and everyone else benefits Two of the four shortest Super Bowl prices in football play in the same division. The Rams and Seahawks split their two meetings last season, then met again in the NFC Championship Game, where Seattle won on the way to the title. They play twice more starting this fall. That is bad news for both of them. Two games a year against a genuine Super Bowl contender is a tax nobody else in the conference pays, and it raises the odds that one of them ends up as a wild card with a road playoff path. Detroit sits around +1600 and is the team most likely to benefit. So are the 49ers at roughly +1800. Neither has to survive the NFC West gauntlet to get a top seed, and in a conference where the two best rosters are busy beating each other up, the shortest route to a bye may run through Michigan or the Bay Area. Week 1 is loud and mostly meaningless The full Week 1 slate runs Wednesday through Monday. Seattle opened as a 3.5 to 4.5-point favorite over New England, which tells you the market sees the Super Bowl gap as smaller than the scoreboard suggested. Here’s the useful way to watch the opening weekend. Ignore final scores. Watch these three things instead: Offensive line continuity. Groups that stayed together over the offseason usually look sharp in September while rebuilt units take six weeks to gel. That’s the most reliable early-season signal there is. Snap counts, not stat lines. A back who plays 65% of snaps in a blowout loss matters more than one who scores twice on 12 touches. Usage is sticky. Touchdowns are not, which is the same principle behind our 2026 fantasy football draft strategy. Quarterback mobility. For Mahomes specifically, but for every returning injury case. How a passer moves in a live pocket in Week 1 tells you more than any training camp report. What to actually expect The Rams are the best team on paper, which historically means somewhere between a title and a divisional round exit. Seattle is well-built enough to repeat and will still be underrated by most people because the model that liked them least last year now likes them most. The AFC will sort…