American Football Restarted in Dublin on Saturday and the NFL Opens in Seattle on the Ninth of September
North Carolina beat TCU 15-10 at the Aer Lingus College Football Classic. The Patriots visit the Super Bowl champion Seahawks to start the NFL year.
The American football calendar reopened on Saturday 29 August with a Week Zero card, and the professional season follows on Wednesday 9 September.
The headline college game was played in Dublin. North Carolina beat TCU 15-10 at the Aer Lingus College Football Classic, a low-scoring result in a fixture the organisers have used for several years to open the season outside the United States. Elsewhere on Week Zero, USC beat San Jose State 42-26. The rest of the card paired NC State with Virginia, Jacksonville State with North Dakota State, Sacramento State with Eastern Michigan, Hawaii with Stanford, New Mexico State with Florida State and Memphis with UNLV.
The NFL opens with the New England Patriots at the Seattle Seahawks on Wednesday 9 September, 8:20pm Eastern on NBC. Seattle host it because they are the defending champions, having won Super Bowl LX. Week one also carries a Thursday game in East Melbourne, Australia, between the San Francisco 49ers and the Los Angeles Rams, streamed on Netflix, and closes with Denver at Kansas City on the Monday.
That Melbourne fixture is part of a record nine international games in 2026, including the league's first regular-season matches in Australia and in France. The NFL has been expanding its overseas schedule for a decade, but nine games is the point at which it stops being an experiment and becomes a fixed part of the calendar.
The offseason moved three established quarterbacks. Kirk Cousins went from Atlanta to Las Vegas, Kyler Murray from Arizona to Minnesota, and Tua Tagovailoa from Miami to Atlanta. Eight teams changed head coach, among them Las Vegas hiring Pete Carroll and Buffalo parting with Sean McDermott after nine seasons. Stephon Gilmore and Philip Rivers both retired.
The salary cap was set at a record 301.2 million dollars per team, a rise of about 22 million on the previous year, which is the practical reason so many veteran contracts moved at all.
Ten days separate the college opening weekend from the professional one. Both leagues will have played by the middle of September.