NFL Season To Kick Off On A Wednesday For First Time Since 2012 As Seattle Seahawks Begin Title Defense

The next NFL season will open on a Wednesday night for the first time since 2012, with the Seattle Seahawks beginning their Super Bowl title defense on September 9.

Seattle’s opponent will be confirmed at a later date, but the game is set to air on NBC and stream on Peacock. The 2012 season’s unusual bow, which was then the first on Wednesday since 1948, resulted from the league wanting to avoid conflict with President Obama’s acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention.

The Seahawks beat the New England Patriots last month to claim the second Super Bowl championship in franchise history.

The shift to Wednesday from the longtime Thursday opening night has nothing to do with politics this time around. Instead, it has to do with federal rules barring the NFL from playing games on Fridays or Saturdays from the second week of September through mid-December, so as to avoid crowding high school and college games.

Because the NFL has been pushing its international games, positioning them just after the domestic kickoff, the Friday-Saturday rules became a problem, so the solution was to start the season a day earlier than usual. On Thursday, September 10, the NFL has set an International Series game in Melbourne, Australia between the San Francisco 49ers and Los Angeles Rams.

The TV or streaming home for that game has not been announced. Last year in that same window, YouTube made history with its first NFL livestream, carrying the Kansas City Chiefs-L.A. Chargers game from Brazil. The video giant said it brought in 17.3 million global viewers with that broadcast, including 1.1 million people tuning in outside of the U.S. A Brazil tilt in 2024 streamed exclusively on Peacock.

The rights to the Australia game are being bundled with those for a handful of other international games, according to recent press reports. With the NFL placing increasing emphasis on its non-U.S. schedule as it looks to expand the fan base for football in other parts of the world, there has been speculation that one of the International Series games this season could air during the traditional Sunday afternoon window controlled by CBS and Fox.

High-stakes negotiations of overall NFL rights packages are ramping up between the league and its media partners. The NFL is exercising its right to renegotiate current contracts given the change of control at one rights holder, Paramount. The deals run through 2032, but the renegotiating clause was triggered by last year’s Paramount-Skydance merger.

Initial reports have indicated that discussions are at an early stage, but the NFL is said to be looking for at least an extra $1 billion a year, a sum that would likely be disruptive to traditional media companies. CBS, NBC, Fox, Disney and other rightsholders can decline to re-up, but could find that the price goes even higher once the negotiating window reopens in a few years.