Mike McCready gave the Seahawks’ season debut a familiar Seattle edge on Wednesday, performing the National Anthem before kickoff against the New England Patriots at Lumen Field. The Pearl Jam guitarist was part of a pregame ceremony that turned the opening minutes of Week 1 into a celebration of the city’s football and music identity.
That mattered because Seattle did not just walk onto the field for a game. It walked into a season opener framed as a Super Bowl LX rematch, with the pregame script built around that matchup and the crowd waiting for the next chapter to begin. McCready’s anthem set the tone before the ball was kicked, while the Seahawks also leaned on another homegrown figure when Richard Sherman raised the ceremonial 12 Flag.
The ceremony kept stacking symbols. The Seahawks unveiled a banner celebrating their Super Bowl LX victory with the help of Kam Chancellor, and the Mwango sisters sang Lift Every Voice and Sing before kickoff. By the time McCready finished, the night had already been shaped less like a routine opener and more like a stage-managed reminder of where the franchise had just been and what it wanted this new season to feel like.
That is where the friction sits. The game was presented as a rematch with the Patriots, but the banner hanging at Lumen Field celebrated a Super Bowl LX victory, a victory that changed the emotional temperature of the evening before the first snap. The Seahawks were opening 2026 with a championship frame around them, and the pregame ceremony made clear that the team wanted the crowd looking back and ahead at once.
McCready’s selection fit that idea even without an official explanation for it. As a founding member and lead guitarist of Pearl Jam, he represents the kind of Seattle name that carries weight far beyond a single appearance, and the anthem placed that identity front and center before the Seahawks’ first game of the 2026 season. After the ceremony, attention shifted to the field, where the Seahawks were set to start the year against the Patriots in Week 1 and see whether the celebration around them would carry into the game itself.
