Seahawks Ready to Repeat

 

By Bo Crouch ~ Football Talk

SEATTLE — There are seasons that begin with a question mark.

This is not one of those seasons.

The Seattle Seahawks open the 2026 NFL season Wednesday night at Lumen Field carrying something the franchise has only carried once before in its history: the weight, and the target, of a defending Super Bowl champion.

And on cue, the league handed them the most fitting possible way to start defending it.

Seattle hosts the New England Patriots on Wednesday, Sept. 9, in a rematch of Super Bowl LX, the game the Seahawks won 29-13 back in February at Levi's Stadium behind Sam Darnold's poise and Kenneth Walker III's legs. It's the NFL's official Kickoff Game, it airs on NBC with a 5:20 p.m. PT start, and it's happening on a Wednesday only because the league needed Thursday night clear for the Rams and 49ers to play in Melbourne, Australia. That quirk of scheduling makes the Seahawks the ninth current NFL franchise to have played a game on every single day of the week.

None of that matters once the ball is kicked.

What matters is that New England is walking back into the building where its season ended, and Seattle is opening its title defense by beating the same team twice inside seven months. Oddsmakers have the Seahawks as 3.5-point favorites. History says beware the letdown that sometimes follows a parade. Seattle seems determined not to let that be the story.

A Different Locker Room, A Similar Blueprint

Championship rosters don't stay frozen in place, and this one didn't either.

Kenneth Walker III, the Super Bowl LX MVP who ran for 135 yards in the title game, is gone, off to Kansas City on a three-year, $43 million deal. Cornerback Riq Woolen left for Philadelphia. Coby Bryant is gone as well. Offensive coordinator Klint Kubiak, the architect of a Seattle offense that finally clicked in year one with Darnold under center, is gone too — hired away by the Las Vegas Raiders as their new head coach, taking quarterbacks coach Andrew Janocko with him.

Replacing all of that starts with two words: Brian Fleury.

Head coach Mike Macdonald passed on an in-house promotion and instead poached Fleury from the 49ers, where he spent seven seasons on Kyle Shanahan's staff, most recently as San Francisco's run-game coordinator and tight ends coach. It's a scheme marriage that makes sense — Fleury's West Coast, zone-running background isn't far removed from what Kubiak installed a year ago — and the hope in Renton is that Darnold and Jaxon Smith-Njigba won't miss a beat in translation.

That continuity matters because Seattle just made its receiver the highest-paid in the sport.

Smith-Njigba led the NFL with 1,793 receiving yards and caught 119 passes last season on his way to Offensive Player of the Year, and the Seahawks locked him up in March on a four-year, $168.6 million extension with $120 million guaranteed — a deal that runs through 2031. It's a bet that the connection between Darnold and his top target is the engine of this offense for years to come, not just one magical season.

The backfield is where Seattle's title defense will be tested first. With Walker gone, the plan begins with Zach Charbonnet, who is still working his way back from a torn ACL suffered in the divisional round and isn't expected to be full-go for the opener. Until he is, first-round rookie Jadarian Price out of Notre Dame steps in as the presumptive lead back, with George Holani and free-agent addition Emanuel Wilson rounding out the room. It's a committee by necessity, not by choice, and how quickly it finds rhythm behind Fleury's zone scheme will say a lot about how the offense travels early on.

The Defense Doesn't Need Reinventing

If the offense is the story of transition, the defense is the story of continuity.

Seattle allowed just 17.2 points per game a year ago, best in the NFL, and held opponents to a top-three rushing defense in the process. The Seahawks kept the widest part of that unit intact, and locked up cornerback Devon Witherspoon on a long-term extension to make sure it stays that way. Replacing Woolen and Mafe on the perimeter and off the edge will be the offseason's quiet undertaking, but this is still a defense built to keep Seattle in every game it plays, regardless of who's opposite Sam Darnold in the huddle.

The Road Ahead

The schedule doesn't ease them in.

After the Patriots, Seattle heads to Arizona and then Washington before a two-game homestand against the Chargers and 49ers. A short week sends them to Denver on Thursday night in Week 6, kicking off a stretch of three straight national windows — Kansas City on Sunday night, Chicago on Monday night — before a Week 9 home date with the Cardinals and a trip to Las Vegas to face Kubiak's Raiders in Week 10. A Week 11 bye arrives late. December is where it tightens: at San Francisco, a Monday night in Dallas, home dates with the Giants and Philadelphia, then Christmas night against the Rams at Lumen Field before closing the regular season back in Los Angeles against that same Rams team.

Six primetime games. A franchise record. Bookended, fittingly, by the two teams Seattle beat to win it all — New England to open, and the Rams, the NFC Championship victims, to close.

Where the League Sees Them

Vegas hasn't forgotten what happened in February, but it also hasn't crowned Seattle to do it again.

The Rams, freshly loaded after trading for Myles Garrett and welcoming Aaron Donald out of retirement, sit as the betting favorites both to win the NFC West and to win it all. Seattle's win total opened at 10.5 — modest for a 14-3 defending champion — with most oddsmakers leaning toward the over given a defense that isn't going anywhere and a receiver corps that just got paid to stay. The Seahawks carry the third- or fourth-shortest Super Bowl LXI odds in the league, somewhere in the neighborhood of 11-to-1 or 12-to-1, trailing the Rams, Ravens, and Bills.

Whether that's disrespect or simply a crowded field of contenders depends on who you ask in Seattle this week.

What isn't in question is the opponent standing across the field Wednesday night, or what happened the last time these two teams shared a stadium.

The Patriots know. Lumen Field is about to remind them again.