Posted at 10:00 AM EST. Odds are subject to change.

New England +3½ over Seattle

8:20 PM EST. If you bet New England in last year's Super Bowl, there isn't a chance in hell you want anything to do with the Patriots tonight. Your ticket was dead from the opening kickoff. Seattle destroyed them 29-13 in a game that somehow wasn't even as close as that score suggests. The Patriots couldn't protect Drake Maye, couldn't move the football with any consistency and looked like they had accidentally wandered onto the field while searching for their seats. Seattle dominated them from start to finish. Seven months later, the Seahawks are home, they're the defending Super Bowl champions, and they're laying just 3½ points against the team they just humiliated. Where do we sign?

That's exactly the problem. Everything about this game screams Seattle. If you lost money on New England in February, you're probably more likely to invite your ex-wife over for dinner than bet the Patriots again tonight. Meanwhile, Seattle has spent the entire offseason hearing about how nobody respects the defending champs. The Rams get more attention. Other NFC contenders get more attention. Poor Seattle won the damn Super Bowl and apparently nobody sent them enough flowers. Now they get to unveil the banner at home against the team they just dismantled. You couldn't design a more attractive favorite if you gave Las Vegas a focus group and six months to work on it.

There are legitimate reasons to believe this game won't resemble February. New England went out and addressed its most obvious weakness by acquiring A.J. Brown and adding Romeo Doubs, giving Maye weapons he simply didn't have in the Super Bowl. Seattle, meanwhile, lost Super Bowl MVP Kenneth Walker III, changed offensive coordinators and lost some important pieces from its defense, particularly in the secondary. Coby Bryant and Riq Woolen are gone, while additional injuries have further tested Seattle's depth on the back end. Seattle was unquestionably the superior team in February. But September isn't February, and assuming we're simply going to get a rerun because the uniforms haven't changed is exactly the sort of thinking that gets bettors into trouble.

Then there's Sam Darnold. He was terrific last year and deserves all the credit in the world for quarterbacking a championship team, but we're not quite ready to erase the previous seven years from the hard drive. Darnold still has that occasional moment when pressure arrives and he looks like somebody just handed him a live grenade and asked him to make a decision. Even some Seattle fans acknowledge the experience can be terrifying. The Seahawks also had a much friendlier road to the championship than people remember, including a Patriots team that arrived at the Super Bowl after an unusually soft regular-season schedule. None of that takes the Lombardi Trophy away, but it does make us reluctant to treat last year's result as some eternal declaration that Seattle owns this matchup.

Opening night is all about perception, and there may not be a stronger perception on the entire Week 1 board than Seattle being the obvious side tonight. The defending champs are home. They destroyed this opponent the last time we saw them. The Patriots looked fraudulent down the stretch last year, and anyone who backed them in the Super Bowl probably still wakes up occasionally wondering why they did it. Seattle may very well beat them again, but we're not interested in betting what everybody already knows. We're interested in betting what everybody wants absolutely nothing to do with. If the bookmakers really decided to start the NFL season by hanging free money on Seattle, congratulations to them on their sudden career change into philanthropy. We'll take our chances that they haven't.

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