The Philadelphia Eagles will start defending their championship at home on Sept. 4 against their NFC East rival Dallas Cowboys in a rare intra-division matchup for the NFL's annual regular-season kickoff game.
The selection was revealed on Monday by the NFL, the first in a series of announcements of notable games on each of the league's broadcasters ahead of the full schedule release on Wednesday night.
The Eagles will also be featured in a Saturday doubleheader on Fox on Dec. 20, with a road game against another NFC East foe, the Washington Commanders. The other game on Fox pits the Green Bay Packers against the Chicago Bears, in an NFC North matchup in Chicago. That doubleheader will put the NFL in a ratings competition against the College Football Playoff, with three first-round games scheduled that day — two on TNT and one on ESPN — creating some inevitable overlap.
The NFL will unveil the matchups for its record seven international games this season on Tuesday, along with a handful of marquee games — on ESPN, CBS and Netflix.
The Cowboys-Eagles matchup will be on Thursday night, the leadoff for NBC's package of primarily Sunday night games. NBC also announced that its streaming service, Peacock, will exclusively broadcast a Saturday night game in Week 17 on Dec. 27, a matchup that will be determined later from a pool of possible options and selected based on the relevancy to the playoff races.
Every team will be alive and well, of course, when the Eagles and Cowboys play in Week 1 for the first time in 25 years. Dallas has opened eight times since then against a different NFC East opponent, the New York Giants.
This year, the matchup will feature the first game for the Cowboys under new coach Brian Schottenheimer and the expected return of quarterback Dak Prescott, who missed the second half of last season because of a hamstring injury that contributed to a 7-10 finish and their first absence from the playoffs since 2020. Including their annual Thanksgiving Day home games, the Cowboys have won seven straight Thursday games.
The NFL has opened the regular season with a Thursday night game since 2002, largely with the reigning Super Bowl champion as the home team, with a few exceptions. This will be only the fourth time an intra-division game was selected and the first since the Green Bay Packers played the Chicago Bears in 2019. The Bears weren't the defending champions that year, but the league picked its most-played series to highlight the beginning of its 100th season.
The Dec. 27 matchup will be the fourth game shown exclusively on Peacock, with broadcasts also available on NBC stations in the markets of the competing teams. Peacock had the Eagles' opener last season against the Green Bay Packers in Brazil on a Friday night as well as an AFC wild-card game between the Miami Dolphins and Kansas City Chiefs in the 2023 playoffs and a Week 16 game between the Buffalo Bills and Los Angeles Chargers in 2023.
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