According to John Ourand of Puck<\/a>, the NFL is looking at making the Los Angeles Rams vs. San Francisco 49ers game in Melbourne, Australia a midweek matchup. Over the past two seasons, the league has scheduled a Week 1 international game in Brazil on Friday, but this year\u2019s start date is in the window where the NFL is prohibited from airing on Friday nights due to the ol\u2019 Sports Broadcasting Act of 1961.<\/p>\nEither the Rams and 49ers will play on Thursday, which means the Seahawks\u2019 home opener would be on a Wednesday night (Sept. 9), or the Seahawks would remain on Thursday (Sept. 10) and the opening game would be Rams-49ers in Australia.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s not been common for the reigning champion to be anything other than the regular season curtain raiser. In 2013, the Baltimore Ravens had to play on the road against the Denver Broncos due to a scheduling conflict with the MLB\u2019s Orioles. The 2019 season was the league\u2019s 100th anniversary, which meant having age-old rivals in the Green Bay Packers and Chicago Bears serve as the first game, while the defending champion New England Patriots played on Sunday night. The 2012 New York Giants had to open their season against the Dallas Cowboys on Wednesday due to the Democratic National Convention on Thursday. That\u2019s it in terms of Super Bowl champions not having a Thursday night Week 1home game since this tradition began with the New England Patriots in the 2004 season.<\/p>\n
We\u2019ll know more by the time the schedule comes out in mid-May, if not a little sooner than that. It\u2019s certainly mildly amusing that this is even a possibility.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"With only a few exceptions since 2004, the Super Bowl champion has the honor of hosting the opening…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":753570,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2079],"tags":[7,1014,58,2444,2611,6,424,12043],"class_list":{"0":"post-753569","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-los-angeles-rams","8":"tag-football","9":"tag-los-angeles","10":"tag-los-angeles-rams","11":"tag-losangeles","12":"tag-losangelesrams","13":"tag-nfl","14":"tag-rams","15":"tag-seattle-seahawks-schedule"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/channels.im\/@nfl\/116073938560455968","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/753569","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=753569"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/753569\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/753570"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=753569"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=753569"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=753569"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}