The 2025 NFL season is in the books, and the Seattle Seahawks are Super Bowl champions. Seattle utterly dominated the New England Patriots in Super Bowl LX, smothering New England’s offense all night in game that wasn’t nearly as close as the 29-13 final score would indicate.
Now, the race begins in earnest for one of the other 31 teams to dethrone them. All throughout the offseason, teams will go about remaking their rosters with trades and free agency and draft picks in an attempt to be the last team standing at the end of next season.
We don’t yet know how that next season will end, but we do know how it will start: with the Seahawks playing host for the annual season-opening game on “Thursday Night Football.” And that’s why we’re here today: to determine which opponent would be the best one for the league to schedule in the first game of the year.
The Seahawks are scheduled to have nine home games in 2026. They’ll play the division rival Arizona Cardinals, Los Angeles Rams and San Francisco 49ers, of course. And because of the way the league’s rotating schedule works, the Seahawks will also square off with the Dallas Cowboys and New York Giants from the NFC East, the Kansas City Chiefs and Los Angeles Chargers from the AFC West, the first-place Chicago Bears from the NFC North and — interestingly enough — the first-place Patriots from the AFC East.
So without further ado, we’re going to rank the best potential Week 1 matchups for the Super Bowl champions.
Honorable mention: New England Patriots
The league doesn’t love scheduling Super Bowl rematches for the first game of the season, but it has happened before. Back in 2016, the Denver Broncos opened the season against the Carolina Panthers after having previously demolished them in Super Bowl 50. Perhaps the NFL could do something similar here after a similarly uncompetitive Super Bowl, but with a bunch of other options available to them, it seems at least somewhat unlikely.
5. Kansas City Chiefs
This ranking assumes that Patrick Mahomes will be healthy to start the season, which is obviously not a guarantee. It wouldn’t exactly be light work for Mahomes to go up against the ferocious Seattle defense in his first game back from a torn ACL, but it would definitely be fun for those of us watching at home to see just how healthy and ready to go he is in his return from injury. It’s hard to imagine a tougher test for him, and you know everybody would be locked in to watch.
4. Dallas Cowboys
The league always loves putting the Cowboys in prime time, as we saw this past year when they opened the season against the defending champion Eagles on “Thursday Night Football.” The appeal of this game, though, is the explosive Dallas offense against the Seattle defense. Assuming the Cowboys bring George Pickens back, there would be few offenses in the league better suited to trying to beat what Seattle can do to opposing teams. Plus, we’d have Demarcus Lawrence getting to rub his Super Bowl win in Jerry Jones’ face as an additional storyline leading up to the game.
3. Chicago Bears
The Bears were the cardiac kids all year in 2025, and giving them a matchup with the defending champs in Week 1 would serve as a strong test of whether they can put together a similar season in 2026. Ben Johnson against Mike Macdonald is one of the best schematic matchups possible in the league these days, and giving it a showcase on opening night would be a gift to football nerds everywhere.
2. San Francisco 49ers
1. Los Angeles Rams
These two teams will play each other in Australia at some point during the season, and it’s widely expected that the game will place in Week 1. If that’s indeed the case, that would knock each of these two teams off the list of potential Seahawks opponents entirely.
All that said … speaking of one of the best schematic matchups possible in the league these days, we could also go with Kyle Shanahan against Mike Macdonald. Shanahan spoke during Super Bowl week about how difficult it is to attack Macdonald’s Seattle defense, and giving him a chance to try it again on opening night after his team failed to score a touchdown in either of its last two games against the Seahawks would be a nice opportunity for vengeance. Especially if the 49ers are actually healthy to begin the season, this would make for a great game to open the year.
Of course, we have to go with the Rams in the No. 1 slot. The Rams and Seahawks played three of the best games of the year in 2025, each seemingly more closely contested than the last. The Rams seemed like one of the only teams in the league that could actually move the ball with any degree of consistency against the Seattle defense, a testament to Sean McVay as well as league MVP Matthew Stafford and both Puka Nacua and Davante Adams. Giving the Rams another opportunity to go up against the reigning champions and their league-best defense is the best show the league could possibly put on for opening night.
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