Report: Seahawks will open 2026 NFL season playing their 1st-ever Wednesday game
Looks like the Seahawks’ defense of their Super Bowl title will begin with a unique opener.
That is, on a day they’ve never played.
The NFL is expected to schedule the Seahawks’ first game of the 2026 league for Wednesday, Sept. 9, at Lumen Field in Seattle, Joe Flint of The Wall Street Journal reported Tuesday morning.
The league, through a spokesman, did not respond to The News Tribune’s request for confirmation Tuesday.
A Wednesday game would mean the Seahawks will have played at least one regular-season game on every day of the week in its history.
Seattle’s opponent for the opener is still to be determined.
With the Rams and 49ers playing each other in Week 1 (more on that below), the Seahawks have seven possible 2026 home opponents for their opener: a Super Bowl-rematch against the Patriots, plus against the Bears, Cowboys, Giants, Chargers, Chiefs or Cardinals.
The league is expected to announce its 2026 schedule in mid-May. As defending champions, the Seahawks are likely to have several showcase games next season, including in prime time and potentially Thanksgiving and/or Christmas.
So why Wednesday for the Seahawks to kick off the 2026 NFL season?
The league traditionally gives the first game of the season to the team that won the previous season’s Super Bowl, as a Thursday night primetime home game on NBC television.
This year the league also is scheduling its first NFL regular-season game in Australia. That will be between Seattle’s division rivals the Los Angeles Rams and San Francisco 49ers. If the Seahawks are hosting the league opener Wednesday, the Australia game would be on Thursday, Sept. 10.
To minimize the effects of traveling on 16-hour flights each way to that game, the league is having the Rams and 49ers play in Melbourne, Australia, in Week 1. That’s so those teams can go early, and can gain a day travelling back east after that game across the International Date Line to the U.S. West Coast. A Thursday game in Australia would mean a Thursday return to the U.S. for the Rams and 49ers, and still nine days until their Week 2 games instead of needing a full bye that won’t happen in Week 2.
A Wednesday league opener would mean 10 days of rest for the Seahawks between their Week 1 and Week 2 games.
Each year the NFL opens its season the weekend after Labor Day. That’s to avoid a holiday weekend for its openers that used to suppress television ratings.
The league can’t have a week-one game on Friday after Labor Day this year because of a 65-year-old law Congress passed to help support for high-school and college football.
The Sports Broadcasting Act of 1961 allows sports leagues to be exempt from federal antitrust laws and pool their own television contracts by exclusive, league-wide deals with national networks. The act also bars NFL games on Friday night or Saturday from the second Friday of September through the second Saturday of December.
It will take rescheduling of the Sounders to get this year’s NFL opener to be the first Wednesday regular-season game in the Seahawks’ 51-year history.
The Sounders are scheduled to host Sporting Kansas City in a Major League Soccer match at Lumen Field on the night of Wednesday, Sept. 9. The Mariners are scheduled for a 6:40 p.m. that same evening against Texas, across the street at T-Mobile Park. To make it all work with the Seahawks’ special opener, the Sounders and Mariners are expected to reschedule their games.
The Seahawks played their first Tuesday game in 2021, at the Rams. That was during the pandemic. That was a Sunday game rescheduled to Tuesday because of 16 positive COVID-19 cases on the Rams.
Seattle hosted Denver on a Friday night, Dec. 20, 1985. That was when the league was experimenting with one-off Friday games on ABC during the holidays, outside the window of the Sports Broadcasting Act of 1961.
The Seahawks have played many Thursday night games and multiple times on Saturdays during the holidays, as the NFL does each winter. The most recent Saturday game for Seattle was week 18 this past season, Jan. 3, 2026, at San Francisco. The Seahawks won that game 13-3 to win the NFC West and the top conference playoff seed to the Super Bowl.
The Seahawks have a 31-13 record all-time on Monday nights. That includes their 27-19 home win over Houston this past season, on Oct. 20.
That was the second of 14 wins in 15 games for Seattle to end the season, through the Seahawks’ victory over New England in Super Bowl 60 last month.
This story was originally published March 17, 2026 at 2:11 PM.
