Everyone remembers Malcolm Butler’s shocking goal-line interception that secured Tom Brady, Bill Bellichik, and the New England Patriots the Lombardi Trophy at Super Bowl XLIX back in 2015. Fewer, however, will know that that fateful evening in Arizona was the last time the Pats managed to beat the Seattle Seahawks. The two teams have met four times since, and the Hawks have won them all, including most recently back in February when the fearsome ‘Dark Side’ defense romped its way to a lopsided 29-13 triumph in Santa Clara.
In the 2026 NFL kickoff game, the Seahawks will be looking to extend that perfect run against the Patriots to five as the two teams meet in an immediate Super Bowl rematch at Lumen Field to raise the curtain on the new campaign. And online betting sites make the defending champions the favorites to emerge with the win once more. The latest odds from 5Gringos online sportsbook currently position Seattle as a four-point betting favorite, as well as a -210 frontrunner on the moneyline.
But if Seattle currently owns the storyline heading into 2026, it’s the Los Angeles Rams that own the odds board. Matthew Stafford enters the season as reigning NFL MVP off a year in which he threw for 4,707 yards and 46 touchdowns, powering a league-best 30.5 points per game with Puka Nacua and Davante Adams — the league leaders in catches and receiving touchdowns — both still catching his passes. Then the Rams
went and got Myles Garrett, the NFL’s all-time single-season sack leader, and traded for Trent McDuffie from the Kansas City Chiefs before handing him a four-year, $124 million extension.
They are now the overwhelming +550 favorites to lift the Lombardi next season, and Sean McVay knows exactly what that pressure means. Super Bowl LXI lands at SoFi Stadium, the same home building where his Rams beat Cincinnati 23-20 back in 2022. Anything short of a repeat now reads as a disappointment.
So, that’s the lay of the land as the 2026 NFL season rears its head. But where do Canadian fans fit into the picture? Well, here are the teams that fans from north of the border will have their eyes on in 2026.
The Bills built their Canadian following one Peace Bridge crossing at a time, decades of fans making the short hop south long before Josh Allen turned the Bills into perennial contenders. And that’s without mentioning the ultimately ill-fated Toronto Series. But the loyalty predates the good years — it was forged in four straight Super Bowl losses in the ’90s, and it’s why Bills Mafia didn’t blink when Buffalo went 12-5 in 2025, beat Jacksonville in the Wild Card round, then lost yet another heartbreaker, this time in the Divisional round at Denver.
Long-serving head coach Sean McDermott was fired after one playoff disaster too many, and that will have certainly landed like a kidney punch in sports bars from Fort Erie to Ottawa. Rookie head coach Joe Brady now inherits a roster reshaped around DJ Moore, Bradley Chubb, and a restructured Allen contract freeing $40 million in cap space, even as James Cook quietly led the league in rushing with 1,621 yards. 2026, much like most of the last six years or so, feels like now or never.
Seattle’s pull in British Columbia was never just proximity — it’s that Pacific Northwest identity doesn’t stop at a border checkpoint. Vancouver bars have worn Seahawks green since the Russell Wilson era, and Super Bowl XLVIII only cemented it. So watching Kenneth Walker III win Super Bowl MVP in February, then walk out the door to Kansas City weeks later, stung in a very specific way — the same feeling BC fans have absorbed before.
John Schneider softened the blow by locking up Rashid Shaheed and fifth-year options for Jaxon Smith-Njigba and Devon Witherspoon, but losing Coby Bryant and Boye Mafe too means this title defense starts thinner than the one that won it.
Kansas City’s fandom north of the border happened almost overnight, somewhere around the moment Taylor Swift showed up in a suite repping a jersey with Travis Kelce’s name on the back. Three titles in five years will do that. It will drag in the fans from far and wide, and Canadian fans are no different.
But that’s what made 2025 so brutal to watch: a 6-11 collapse, the Chiefs’ first missed playoffs since 2014, nine straight division titles gone. Then Patrick Mahomes tore his ACL and LCL in Week 15, and the bandwagon went quiet. Kansas City spent its offseason rebuilding around that silence — sending McDuffie to the Rams for two first-rounders, turning them into Mansoor Delane and Peter Woods, re-signing Kelce for one more run.
Miami’s Canadian base was always smaller — pockets in Halifax and along the BC coast, drawn by Tua Tagovailoa hitting Tyreek Hill in stride. That whole identity got dismantled in 2025. A 7-10 finish. GM Chris Grier fired mid-collapse at 2-7. Mike McDaniel gone after the season. Tagovailoa was released to a monster dead cap hit, and then Hill, Jaylen Waddle, and Minkah Fitzpatrick were traded away one by one. It felt less like a rebuild than a funeral. Jeff Hafley is now tasked with reconstructing one of the NFL’s most storied franchises from the ground up.
Photo: Alan Kotok, Pixabay
