2026 NFL Preseason Scores and Predictions: Week 1 Picks and Results

Six of the 16 games in NFL preseason Week 1 are already final, and ten have not kicked off. Thursday gave us a rookie third-round pick throwing for 153 yards, the No. 1 overall pick throwing his first professional touchdown, and a game that ended 13-13 — which, in the preseason, is allowed to happen.

Below are all six results, the ten remaining kickoffs with the outlet carrying each one, and a pick for every game still to play. The picks are built on what coaches have actually said about who is playing, because in August that is the only thing that reliably decides these games.

What were the NFL preseason Week 1 scores on Thursday?

All six Thursday games are final, and the widest margin was the Chargers’ 20 points. Two of the six were decided by a field goal or less.

Two teams came into Thursday having already played. Carolina and Arizona opened the exhibition season in the Hall of Fame Game at Canton on 6 August, which the Panthers won 33-30 — so Arizona’s win over Las Vegas made the Cardinals 1-1 while everyone else was still at 0-0.

Why did the Colts and Patriots game end 13-13?

Because preseason games have no overtime. The NFL removed it in 2021, in the same change that cut the preseason from four games to three: overtime exists to produce a winner, and an exhibition does not need one. A tie at the end of regulation simply stands.

The most useful recent example of one is also the most flattering to whoever ends up in it: Seattle opened the 2025 preseason with a 23-23 tie against the Raiders, then went 14-3 and won Super Bowl LX.

Which NFL preseason Week 1 games are still to play?

Ten games remain — three on Friday 14 August and seven on Saturday 15 August. Friday’s three all kick off together at 7 p.m. ET; Saturday runs in four waves from lunchtime to prime time.

How can I watch the rest of NFL preseason Week 1?

If your team is playing, the answer is almost certainly your local station, not a national channel. Every preseason game is broadcast locally in the two teams’ markets. The national outlets exist for everyone else: NFL Network and the ESPN App carry games out of market, and they are blacked out inside the markets of the teams playing.

That distinction is the one most preseason watch-guides skip, and it changes the advice completely. Across the full week, six games are on NFL Network, five stream in the ESPN App for subscribers on its Unlimited plan, and the other five have no national feed at all — they exist only on local television in two cities each.

Two things are different from last season. ESPN completed its purchase of NFL Network, the RedZone distribution rights and NFL Fantasy on 31 January 2026, with the NFL taking a 10% stake in ESPN in return — so NFL Network’s games now live inside the ESPN app as well as on the channel. And ESPN’s main network has taken one exclusive preseason game of its own: the Raiders and No. 1 pick Fernando Mendoza against the Texans on 20 August at 8 p.m. ET, which is in Week 2, not this one.

Across the whole preseason, NFL Network has 19 out-of-market games between 13 and 29 August and the ESPN App has 12 more.

Who will win the remaining Week 1 games?

Five of the ten games have a coach on record about who plays; those are the five we are most confident about. August football is not decided by which roster is better — it is decided by which coach is willing to expose his starters, and for how long. Where that has been said out loud, it is worth more than any read on team quality. Where it has not, the table below says “lean” and means it.

Buccaneers at Jets is the clearest of the ten. Aaron Glenn has said “everybody’s playing” and that Geno Smith — back with the team that drafted him in 2013, after a March trade from Las Vegas — starts. Tampa Bay has confirmed Baker Mayfield will not play. One team is fielding its first-choice offence; the other is not.

Rams at Chiefs turns on an absence that has been public for weeks. Andy Reid has confirmed Patrick Mahomes will not play as he finishes his recovery from December surgery on the ACL and LCL in his left knee, with Justin Fields starting, seventh-round rookie Garrett Nussmeier second and Chris Oladokun third. Kansas City still has a quarterback with real starting experience taking the first-team snaps; the Rams counter with Ty Simpson, the Alabama quarterback they took 13th overall in April .

Browns at Bears has the longest audition of the day. Todd Monken plans to give Deshaun Watson roughly a half and Shedeur Sanders the third quarter, with a two-minute drill each. It is Watson’s first game since he tore his right Achilles in October 2024.

Jaguars at Saints is the one game where the plan cuts against a confident pick. New Orleans is resting its starters after a joint practice with Jacksonville earlier in the week, with Spencer Rattler starting in place of Tyler Shough. We take the Saints on Rattler’s starting experience, and this is the pick we would defend least.

Cowboys at Seahawks is the week’s prime-time game and both sides are treating it lightly: Brian Schottenheimer has said most Dallas starters will not play, which leaves the Cowboys’ real business as the back-and-forth between Sam Howell and Joe Milton III for the backup job behind Dak Prescott. Seattle, opening at home as defending champions, gets the nod.

Of the leans: Atlanta has a genuinely open starting job, with Tua Tagovailoa — signed to a one-year deal after Miami released him in March — against Michael Penix Jr., who is working back from an ACL tear suffered in November. Open jobs get long looks. Washington faces a Miami team rebuilding its offence from the quarterback out, with new head coach Jeff Hafley saying Malik Willis will play. Carolina is the only team in the league that has already played a full game, and a week of live reps in mid-August is worth more than it sounds. Minnesota named Kyler Murray its Week 1 starter and released a depth chart on Wednesday with J.J. McCarthy behind him; Murray is expected to get work on Saturday.

Saturday also splits one coaching story across two games. Baltimore hosts Philadelphia in Jesse Minter’s first game as a head coach — the first Ravens coach other than John Harbaugh since Harbaugh was hired in 2008 — while Harbaugh himself, now in his first year with the Giants after 18 seasons in Baltimore, hosts Minnesota six hours earlier.

Which quarterbacks actually played on Thursday?

Mostly backups and rookies. No quarterback threw for more than 164 yards, and the two established starters who took the field played one series apiece: Joe Burrow went 5-of-6 for 39 yards for Cincinnati, and Jordan Love 3-of-5 for 18 for Green Bay — 11 pass attempts between them.

The two debuts worth the airtime came from opposite ends of the draft. Pittsburgh’s Drew Allar, a third-round pick, went 10-of-13 for 153 yards with two touchdown passes and a third on the ground — his first football since a season-ending ankle injury last October. Mendoza, the No. 1 pick, finished 10-of-16 for 97 yards with a six-yard touchdown to Jack Bech, making him the first top selection to throw a touchdown in his preseason debut since Baker Mayfield in 2018. He was also ninth of the twelve teams’ leading passers, which is roughly the correct amount of significance to attach to it.

Do NFL preseason results predict anything?

Very little, and the clearest evidence is the team that ends this Saturday’s schedule. Seattle went 1-1-1 in the 2025 preseason, including that opening tie and a loss in its final exhibition. It then went 14-3, took the NFC’s No. 1 seed, and beat New England 29-13 in Super Bowl LX.

What preseason games do settle is the bottom half of a roster: backup quarterback jobs, the last receiver spot, a kicker. That is why the useful things to watch this weekend are Watson against Sanders, Howell against Milton, and whether Fields looks like a plausible bridge if Kansas City needs one.

The real deadline is closer than the exhibition schedule suggests. The 2026 regular season kicks off on Wednesday 9 September at 8:20 p.m. ET, with the champions hosting the opener in Seattle, and the NFL’s first regular-season game in Australia — 49ers against Rams at the Melbourne Cricket Ground — the following night.