Clark Hunt doesn’t expect the Chiefs to be in Seattle for the NFL’s season opener.
“I don’t think that’s on the table anymore for us to be in Seattle [for the opener],” the Chiefs chairman and CEO told Front Office Sports. “From a league standpoint, I think there would be some concern whether our quarterback will be ready to go. My guess is the league won’t want to take that risk.”
That quarterback is Patrick Mahomes, who tore his ACL and LCL on Dec. 14, 2025, and has been rehabbing aggressively ever since. Fox’s Jay Glazer reported in early March that Mahomes would be back “by far” before Week 1, and his recovery timeline has reportedly been ahead of schedule. Hunt isn’t disputing any of that. His point is that the league isn’t going to build its biggest night of the year around a maybe, even a well-informed one.
The opener is already one of the stranger scheduling situations in recent memory. The season kicks off on Wednesday, Sept. 9, rather than the traditional Thursday because of the NFL’s first-ever regular-season game in Australia, with the Rams and 49ers heading to Melbourne. The time difference is 19 hours, and the flights push 15 hours each way, so the league settled on having Seattle play on Wednesday while the Rams and 49ers go to Melbourne on Thursday, giving both teams as much recovery time as possible.
The league won’t announce the matchup until mid-May, but based on the Seahawks’ 2026 home opponents, the Bears would be the obvious guess.
About Sam Neumann
Since the beginning of 2023, Sam has been a staff writer for Awful Announcing and The Comeback. A 2021 graduate of Temple University, Sam is a Charlotte native, who currently calls Greenville, South Carolina his home. He also has a love/hate relationship with the New York Mets and Jets.