The Patriots have to stand on the visitors’ sideline tonight and watch Seattle hoist a Super Bowl banner before either team runs a single play. That’s not a scheduling quirk. That’s the NFL picking a scab on purpose, and I am fully here for it.
Seattle beat New England 29-13 back in February to win Super Bowl LX, and now the two teams open the 2026 season together at Lumen Field, on a Wednesday, the first one in Patriots franchise history. The league didn’t have to send New England back to the scene of the crime for the reopening. It had an entire 32-team schedule to work with.
It chose this. The league is even promoting it as the hook, not burying it:
https://x.com/NFL/status/2055076194706690262
And it’s rarer than you’d think. This is only the third time in NFL history a Super Bowl rematch has kicked off the following season, following Denver hosting Carolina in 2016 and Kansas City-Minnesota back in 1970. An algorithm doesn’t reach into the schedule bank and pull that up by accident. The league figured out that revenge is content, and content needs a banner ceremony with the loser standing right there for it.
My dad has been texting me a countdown to this game since roughly June, which is more emotional investment than he’s ever shown in a Jets season that deserved it. But I get it. Watching the Patriots get frog-marched through a championship ceremony for a title they just lost is the kind of thing you circle on the calendar.
Kenneth Walker III ran for 135 yards and won Super Bowl LX MVP, the most rushing yards in a Super Bowl in decades. He also signed with Kansas City this offseason, so the guy who authored the humiliation won’t even be on the field for the sequel. The Patriots have to watch the banner go up anyway. The cruelty doesn’t need the author present. It just needs the building.
Mike Vrabel, for his part, doesn’t sound like a coach dreading a public flogging. Asked directly about facing the ceremony as the road team, he said the Patriots can either fold or “compete, fight, fight through adversity,” and called it a great challenge. Drake Maye reportedly held back tears after the Super Bowl loss and has said it’s fueling him this year, and New England went and got him a real number one target in A.J. Brown. Forcing a team to watch your parade can backfire if that team shows up looking for blood instead of shrinking.
Seattle knows it too. Mike Macdonald has been careful not to let last February bleed into this September, saying you don’t want to fall into the trap of assuming last year’s stuff just repeats itself.
Vegas has this at Seahawks -3.5. If the NFL really wanted maximum theater, you’d think the number would be bigger than that.
