Get ready to see a little more of the Washington Commanders, a little less of the New York Jets, and nary a hint of Kansas City — at least when it comes to seeing the Chiefs in person at SoFi Stadium.
The NFL unveiled its 2025 schedule Wednesday evening, the latest installment in an event that has gone from mundane to monumental.
The league has turned its schedule release into something of a national sports holiday, lifting the curtain on the months-long process of finding the optimal configuration of 272 games played over 18 weeks and broadcast or streamed by 11 different media partners.
It’s virtually impossible to please every franchise and honor every request, but with the help of about 5,000 computers around the world crunching numbers 24/7, the NFL’s scheduling team sifts through hundreds of trillions of potential combinations before picking the winner.
Among the highlights of this year’s schedule:
1. We knew the Chargers were opening the season in Sao Paulo, but we didn’t know the opponent (until Travis Kelce let it slip this week on his podcast). Yes, it’s the Kansas City Chiefs making the Week 1 trip to South America. That means the Chiefs won’t be coming to Los Angeles this season unless it’s in the playoffs. The Chargers had a chance to “protect” two opponents and make them ineligible for that international game, but they chose not to veto a matchup with Kansas City.
2. The league’s rationale is it wants to give YouTubeTV a great game for that Friday showcase, and that AFC West showdown fills the bill. True, the Chiefs won’t be coming to SoFi Stadium, but they play there every other year. Had the NFL made Washington or Minnesota the visitors in that one, those teams might not be back in L.A. for another seven or eight years.
3. The NFL doesn’t have to go huge in the Kickoff Opener to get big TV numbers, but the league will do so with this year’s marquee matchup: Dallas at Philadelphia. The league didn’t like how it had to flex out of that game last season.
4. In fact, the opening week features big divisional bookends. It starts with Cowboys-Eagles and ends on Monday night with Chicago at Minnesota, with the Vikings presumably taking the wrapper off quarterback J.J. McCarthy, last seen winning a national championship for Michigan.
5. Short weeks don’t seem to bother the Rams, and they will get two of them this season with a pair of Thursday night games — one at home (versus San Francisco in Week 5) and one on the road (at Seattle in Week 16).
6. The Rams requested an East Coast game immediately before playing Jacksonville in London in Week 7. The NFL obliged, putting the Rams in Baltimore the week before so the team could have a shorter trip overseas and already be on Eastern time.
7. The Chargers have that long flight to and from Brazil, but they can’t play at SoFi in Week 2 because the stadium is playing host to a Chris Brown concert. So the NFL gave them a short road trip to Las Vegas and made it a Monday night game.
8. There won’t be a Monday night doubleheader in Week 1, as in years past, but there will be two this season, in Weeks 2 and 7.
9. The Commanders are getting a big bump after their playoff run last season, and that includes five prime-time appearances for quarterback Jayden Daniels and his teammates, plus multiple national Sunday windows.
10. The New York Jets, minus Aaron Rodgers, and New England Patriots won’t get as many prime-time appearances as they once did.
11. There’s a changing of the guard this year, with longtime NFL scheduling czar Howard Katz retiring. He’s a legendary figure in league circles who for years pretty much assembled the schedule in his head, just as predecessor Val Pinchbeck did for decades. That’s not to say Katz didn’t use a huge network of computers to do the job — he absolutely did — but he also relied heavily on his gut and broadcast instincts.
12. The league has leaned increasingly into analytics and data science in building the schedule with a team led by Michael North, vice president of broadcast planning. This year, North added Max St. John, a numbers whiz from the University of Virginia to the group, which also includes Hans Schroeder, Dawn Aponte, Onnie Bose, Blake Jones, Lucy Popko, Josh Helmrich and Matthew Winston.
13. St. John works as manager of broadcast analytics, and is focused largely on projecting how reconfigured teams will play this season, as opposed to zeroing in on what they did last season. He said he was surprised by the fluidity of the schedule-building process: “People think that most things are locked in pretty early on, maybe a couple weeks before the schedule is done. But that’s really not the case. You make one small move here and it reshuffles the entire jigsaw puzzle. Things really don’t get locked in until pretty late which is something that I didn’t expect.”
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