{"id":1819,"date":"2026-08-08T04:00:00","date_gmt":"2026-08-08T08:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/stepfoxthemes.com\/gridiron\/preview-chi-at-car-week-1-2026\/"},"modified":"2026-08-08T04:00:00","modified_gmt":"2026-08-08T08:00:00","slug":"preview-chi-at-car-week-1-2026","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stepfoxthemes.com\/gridiron\/preview-chi-at-car-week-1-2026\/","title":{"rendered":"Week 1 preview: Bears at Panthers"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p>Chicago Bears travel to Bank of America Stadium, Charlotte, NC for the opening week of the 2026 season, kick-off Sunday 13 September at 17:00 UTC, live on FOX.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Chicago Bears finished the 2025 season 11-6 and took the 2nd seed in the NFC. Carolina Panthers finished 8-9 and took the 4th seed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The opening line has it at CHI -2.5 with a total of 46.5, which tells you the market is treating this as a home-field game rather than a mismatch.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>What the box score does not carry is the personnel chess. Heavier packages early forced a matchup that never got fixed, and by the fourth quarter the adjustments were coming too late to matter.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Dave Canales is in charge on the home sideline, with Ben Johnson opposite him. Week one form is famously unreliable, but the openers still set the tone for a division race that runs to January.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Chicago Bears open at Bank of America Stadium, live on FOX. Two clubs that finished 11-6 and 8-9 meet on the first weekend.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":29,"featured_media":2764,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[42],"tags":[99,58,59,98],"class_list":["post-1819","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-previews","tag-2026-season","tag-bears","tag-panthers","tag-week-1"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stepfoxthemes.com\/gridiron\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1819","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stepfoxthemes.com\/gridiron\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stepfoxthemes.com\/gridiron\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stepfoxthemes.com\/gridiron\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/29"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stepfoxthemes.com\/gridiron\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1819"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/stepfoxthemes.com\/gridiron\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1819\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2777,"href":"https:\/\/stepfoxthemes.com\/gridiron\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1819\/revisions\/2777"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stepfoxthemes.com\/gridiron\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2764"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stepfoxthemes.com\/gridiron\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1819"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stepfoxthemes.com\/gridiron\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1819"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stepfoxthemes.com\/gridiron\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1819"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}