August 7, 2026
When Does the NFL Season Start? 2026 Dates and Odds
The 2026 NFL season starts Wednesday 9 September, Patriots at Seahawks. Preseason dates, the first game, and how to bet the season with Bitcoin or USDC.
The 2026 NFL regular season starts on Wednesday 9 September 2026, when the New England Patriots play the Seattle Seahawks at Lumen Field. Note the day: it is a Wednesday, not the Thursday the league has opened on for years.
That game is a rematch of Super Bowl LX, which Seattle won 29-13.
When does the NFL preseason start?
It has already started. The Hall of Fame Game was played on 6 August in Canton, Ohio, and Carolina beat Arizona 33-30 on a rushing touchdown as time expired.
Preseason Week 1 proper runs 13 to 15 August, with all 32 teams in action across sixteen games. The preseason then runs through the end of August, and rosters have to be cut from 90 players to 53 before the regular season opens.
When is the first NFL game of the 2026 season?
Patriots at Seahawks, Wednesday 9 September, on NBC and Peacock. That is the first regular-season game. If you count preseason, the first game was the Hall of Fame Game on 6 August.
The distinction matters more than it sounds, because the two are almost different sports. The Hall of Fame Game featured two backup quarterbacks, one of them making his professional debut, and around 35 Arizona players were held out entirely. September's opener will feature the teams that played the Super Bowl.
How many games are in an NFL season?
Seventeen regular-season games per team, played across eighteen weeks, so every team gets one bye week. Preseason games do not count toward the standings and preseason results have no bearing on anything except who makes the roster.
What does the schedule look like after that?
The regular season runs from that September opener through to early January, with the traditional Thanksgiving games in late November. The playoffs follow in January, and the Super Bowl closes the season in February. The league confirms exact playoff dates as the season goes on, so treat any specific January date you see now as provisional.
Does the preseason tell you anything about the season?
Very little, and it is worth being straight about that because a lot of August content pretends otherwise.
The Hall of Fame Game is a good worked example. Arizona's rookie third-round quarterback Carson Beck went 15 of 19 for 188 yards and a touchdown on debut, which reads like a star turn. His backup, Kedon Slovis, then went 9 of 10 for 106 yards and a touchdown, which reads better. Neither of them is Arizona's starting quarterback. The game's leading receiver, Jalen Brooks, caught three passes for 99 yards and is competing for a roster place rather than a starting job.
Those are real performances by real players and they will decide who is employed in September. They tell you almost nothing about how Arizona will play once the players who were rested are on the field.
What a preseason price actually costs
Here is the part that is checkable on our own board rather than a matter of opinion.
Convert both sides of a two-way market to implied probabilities by dividing 1 by the decimal odds, then add them together. A market with no margin totals 100 per cent. A preseason game close to a coin toss came out around 106.4 per cent on our board. A regular-season baseball moneyline runs about 105.2 per cent.
So preseason costs more than a real baseball game and tells you less about the teams involved. That is not a reason nobody should bet it. It is a reason to know what you are buying, and it is the single most useful thing to understand before the season starts properly in September.
NFL betting with Bitcoin
One thing specific to betting the NFL in August rather than in November: season futures placed now do not settle until February.
A Super Bowl ticket bought this week is held for six months, and over those six months you carry two positions rather than one, the bet and the currency it is denominated in. Stake it in Bitcoin and if the coin moves 30 per cent while your team goes 11-6, your return was decided by two things and only one of them was football. Staking a long-hold futures ticket in USDT or USDC instead removes the position you did not choose to take. On a single game settling in three hours it makes no difference and you can use whatever crypto you like.
Jacks Club takes deposits in BTC, ETH, LTC, USDT, USDC, XRP, TRON, TON and SOL, and the current deposit bonus and ongoing promotions apply to sportsbook play.
Where to find the markets
NFL and NFL Preseason are carried as separate competitions on the American football board, alongside the CFL, NCAA and draft markets. Every market on it can be backed with Bitcoin or a stablecoin.
For how the markets themselves work, the NFL betting guide covers the point spread, why 3 and 7 are the key numbers, player props and season futures. If you want the August schedule in detail rather than the September date, the NFL preseason guide has every Week 1 fixture and what the games actually decide. And if you are looking for something to bet between now and September, the MLB betting guide covers a sport that is playing meaningful games right now.