The Seattle Seahawks start their 2026 season on Wednesday night against the New England Patriots at Lumen Field, and the first kickoff comes with a hard question attached to it: can a team that just won Super Bowl LX do it again after losing four key players and changing coordinators?
The answer begins at 8:20 p.m. on NBC, in the same building where the Seahawks will try to turn a championship into a repeat run. They beat the Patriots 29-13 in Super Bowl LX at Levi's Stadium in Santa Clara, California, and now they open the next season with the weight that always follows a title — the pressure to prove the last one was not the peak.
That is why the Seattle Seahawks schedule is being watched so closely this week. The team is trying to become only the 10th repeat champion in NFL history and only the third this century, a standard so rare that every change matters. Brian Fleury, a first-time coordinator, will be asked to help run the offense with Sam Darnold, while John Schneider has already lost four key players from the championship roster, including Kenneth Walker III, the Super Bowl LX MVP, and Riq Woolen. Klint Kubiak was also poached after the title season, leaving another hole in the structure that carried the club to the trophy.
Yet the public message from inside the building sounds nothing like a team backing into a rebuild. Jarran Reed said, “We’re more focused than ever,” and added that nobody talks about the Super Bowl. Richard Sherman got the same feeling during an Aug. 10 practice, when he asked Mike Macdonald, “How did you get these guys so -- this is such a hungry-ass team,” and Macdonald shrugged it off with, “Umm, I don’t know,” before adding, “It’s just what we do, you know?” That contrast matters because the Seahawks can sound locked in and still be missing pieces that helped define them 12 years earlier, when they won Super Bowl XLVIII.
Their first real test of whether that hunger is enough arrives Wednesday night. The Seattle Seahawks do not need a slogan to make the case now; they need the opener to look like the start of a repeat chase, not the beginning of a correction.
