Far be it from me to interrupt the NFL’s monthlong schedule release or its dictatorial hunting down of anyone who’d dare leak info about individual games, but a new season is upon us, believe it or not. This is one of my favorite tentpole events of the year because we have known every team’s slate of opponents for months now and are merely finding out what order these games are in! Imagine if, say, your local pizzeria during restaurant week got a fortnight of content out of revealing what would be on their menu (it’s … pizza … still, just sometimes in Brazil when you don’t want it to be!).
That said, I tend to get excited about different games than most people when they get their first peek at the full 272, because certain pressure points on a schedule can tell us more about a team from a global standpoint than other meaningless fluff propped up by interest in fantasy implications or parlay betting. When it really matters, teams show their innate personalities and the machinations behind the scenes that either promote or take away from a winning atmosphere.
I tried to come up with 10 (but landed on 13) games that will have a lasting impact on the 2025 NFL season … and beyond.
1. Week 2: Los Angeles Chargers at Las Vegas Raiders (MNF)
This matchup intrigues me from two different angles. For one, it gives us a sense of the strength at the bottom tier of the AFC West. We go into seasons assuming that certain divisions will be great, but we never really know until the meaty core of the regular season hits. Las Vegas is among the most improved teams in football this offseason and should, at the very least, prove to be a major disruptor—a different feel to the Gardner Minshew II and Antonio Pierce vehicle from this time last year. It also features a Jim Harbaugh–Jesse Minter–Chip Kelly trifecta, giving us a look at three coaches who were integral parts of the past two collegiate national championships. For all three of them, it is also the second foray into professional football after going back to the college game. As NFL offenses continue to try to find some footing amid a time of transition, it’s often the little wrinkles within these game plans that offer us relevant thoughts as to what college players are capable of and what offenses are going to look like at the NFL level for some time.
2. Week 4: Pittsburgh Steelers vs. Minnesota Vikings (Dublin, Ireland)
Sometimes it’s O.K. to pick a matchup that offers a clearly digestible and obvious narrative focal point. Aaron Rodgers liked the situation in Minnesota. He and the Steelers have been patiently feeling one another out. If he is to play in 2025, it will be for one of these two franchises. I like it when we have a chance in real time to see whether a team made a mistake. This is Rodgers against one of the best defenses in the NFL—a Vikings team that sacked him three times last year, forced him into both his second-worst completion percentage and second-worst passer rating of the year, and set in motion a prematurely ridiculous firing of head coach Robert Saleh (a move, as I understand it, that Rodgers was quite unhappy about at the time). Rodgers tends to reserve an edge for opponents such as this, or, if he’s wearing purple and gold, it would be doubly painful for a Steelers team that waited at the altar for him all offseason. While I am not overly enamored with the idea of shipping premium games overseas at the expense of the American season ticket holder, I am also a Notre Dame fan and can attest that Ireland games have a wonderful feel and aesthetic.
3a. Week 6: Detroit Lions at Kansas City Chiefs (SNF)
3b. Week 11: Detroit Lions at Philadelphia Eagles (SNF)
I feel like not having the Lions play against either the Chiefs or the Eagles last year robbed us of a chance to properly stack up the best teams in the NFL and determine a real pecking order. I was famously not bullish on the Eagles because the team’s schedule lacked reps against top-tier run defenses, which prevented me from projecting just how good this attack really was (especially over the first 10 weeks, though I feel like Eagles fans complaining about my lack of faith in them easily forget my pro–Nick Sirianni stance from Week 5, which was incredibly brave). The Washington Commanders stunning Detroit and knocking the Lions out of the playoffs demolished our hopes of seeing these matchups play out at the height of their significance. This year, Detroit’s schedule drags the Lions through a hellish slate, including dates against nearly all our top Super Bowl contenders, save for Buffalo. Not to take anything away from Dan Campbell and the Lions, but last year’s dominant regular season looks much different in context. Detroit finished the year with four total nondivisional games against playoff opponents. The team’s results in those contests:
• Week 1: 26–20 (OT) win vs. Rams
• Week 2: 20–16 loss vs. Buccaneers
• Week 10: 26–23 win vs. Texans
• Week 15: 48–42 loss vs. Buffalo
In isolating those games, it should have forewarned us a bit better that the Lions were vulnerable against a white-hot Commanders team. I’m not calling Detroit the Paper Lions, but I am saying that we viewed the team’s ascension to the Super Bowl as a sort of inevitability without getting a truly quality sample size of what was happening against opponents the team was not facing twice per year. This season, we’ll get two measuring stick games, both in prime time and roughly one-third and two-thirds of the way through the year.
4. Week 7: Jacksonville Jaguars vs. Los Angeles Rams (London, U.K.)
Teams lobby for certain bye weeks each year, especially those that have an international date on the schedule. The Jaguars not only have the league’s deepest international ties but the NFL’s first modern two-way player in Travis Hunter. This makes the allotment of Jacksonville’s bye at Week 8—following their one trip to London—all the more noteworthy a date on the calendar. When this game rolls around, how is Hunter looking? How many snaps is he playing on either side of the ball? Did the Jaguars lobby for an earlier or later bye week, when in years past they’ve asked not to have the bye week immediately after a trip abroad? Will he play more snaps on his nondominant side of the ball while in London? This team is incredibly invested in the success of Hunter, taking him and presenting him to a coaching staff completely composed of first-timers (first-time head coach, first-time defensive coordinator, first-time offensive coordinator). Along with a first-time general manager, all these dynamics are going to have to be ironed out and sharpened by the time Jacksonville kicks off against the Rams.
5. Week 7: Washington Commanders at Dallas Cowboys
I like this from both a schematic and thematic angle. First, we have Jayden Daniels against a very new-look Cowboys defense that I think has the potential to become one of the best in the NFL. Matt Eberflus is more at home with a personnel set that can supercharge his preferred style of defense. But I am also looking at this the way that Dallas fans might. After Jerry Jones played the eBay underbidding game with Mike McCarthy and lost, leaving him without a head coach for the upcoming season, there were plenty of options out there for the Cowboys to consider. Jones took a major flier on career assistant Brian Schottenheimer. He could have had Kliff Kingsbury instead. Kingsbury has strongly positioned himself as the assistant to watch at the start of the 2025 season, thanks to his work with Daniels in ’24. While this is not always a guarantee that the coach will leave, it does provide us an opportunity to see Jones in a booth sipping $900 whiskey and taking in what could have been had he only opened his checkbook. Then they’ll play again in Dallas on Christmas Day.
6. Week 9: Los Angeles Chargers at Tennessee Titans
NFL coaches typically like to digest player film in four-game sample sizes. So by Week 9, we’ll have both Ward’s initial four-game foray into the NFL—which may represent his biggest initial advantage as the Titans scoop up some wrinkles from Ward’s Miami offense that NFL teams are not equipped to shut down yet—plus four more games for Ward to adjust to said defensive adjustment. In my mind, this is where we’ll see whether Brian Callahan is the guy. As injury and attrition takes its toll on the season, is he consistently putting Ward into spots where he can win? Is he showing him a clean pocket and giving him options? We view Jayden Daniels’s rookie season as a triumph but conveniently ignore the fact that Kliff Kingsbury got over his personal speedbump that he faced as head coach of the Arizona Cardinals—offenses that tended to start fast and peter out toward the end of the year. We don’t know that much about Callahan yet, but we do know that there’s no ceiling on what rookie QBs can accomplish in the right situations.
7a. Week 10: Philadelphia Eagles at Green Bay Packers (MNF)
7b. Week 14: Chicago Bears at Green Bay Packers
I’m grouping these together to illustrate the duality of the Matt LaFleur passive-aggression spectrum. On one hand, LaFleur will be asked to serve as the on-field representative of the Packers, a team that tried to unceremoniously ban the tush push, in a game against the Eagles. This led to an animated owners meetings and the inevitable, creeping feeling that the NFL will eventually deep-six this play one way or another. (And still might before this season.) If the play remains legal, could we see Nick Sirianni run it at least 31 times against the Packers on this particular Monday night? We can hope. If it’s not, will they run 50 traditional QB sneaks with Jalen Hurts to prove they didn’t need the tush push? We’re set either way.
The flip side of this? LaFleur’s first game against Ben Johnson. (They play again two weeks later on Saturday in Week 16.) Johnson saying in his introductory press conference with the Bears that he enjoyed beating LaFleur twice a year while serving as the offensive coordinator of one of the best teams in the NFL was a curiously aggressive maneuver. LaFleur has gone on, in several interviews, to say that he doesn’t know Johnson at all, making the comment even stranger. To add to this, LaFleur alluded to the idea that Johnson was tooting his own horn too much in an interview with ESPN. To believe that this won’t at all creep onto the field is just blatantly false. Football coaches are among the highest-strung and pettiest individuals on the face of the earth. And I, for one, am here for it.
8. Week 11: New York Jets at New England Patriots (TNF)
This rivalry was given brand new siding, decking and an interior facelift as well. Now both teams are led by fiery former players (Mike Vrabel in New England, Aaron Glenn in New York) who know the division well. Both teams have invested heavily in the rebuilding and maintenance of their offensive lines and both are trying to quickly rebrand as no-nonsense tough guys after a personality of old failed to materialize. Specifically with Glenn, this is a tempo-setting game as to how the new Jets coach will approach a quarterback who is sure to be a thorn in his side for years to come.
9. Week 15: Baltimore Ravens at Cincinnati Bengals
It’s impossible to project that a game will be close this far in advance, but both Bengals-Ravens games last year were decided by three points or fewer. One of the two Bengals-Ravens games in 2023 came down to a field goal, as did one more the season before. And in all those games, the Ravens had arguably the greatest kicker in NFL history. While we’re not quite sure what Cleveland will look like and cannot be sure at all what Pittsburgh will look like, we know that Baltimore and Cincinnati will more than likely be relevant in the AFC North, especially if the Bengals are on one of their trademark torrid stretches to try to back themselves into the playoffs. Now, Justin Tucker is gone, ostensibly released for football reasons but in actuality, probably released to avoid whatever impending suspension accompanies a league investigation into allegations of sexual misconduct. Baltimore is a championship-or-bust team with a former special teams savant as its head coach and one of the few teams in the NFL with a kicking-specific coach. Can sixth-round pick Tyler Loop, the theoretical leader in the clubhouse for the kicking job, steel his nerves in time for a game that could have major playoff implications?
10. Week 15: Washington Commanders at New York Giants
Allowing Brian Daboll and Joe Schoen—two embattled figures who required a press conference to explain their return for 2025—to draft a developmental quarterback leads us to believe there’s a runway to clearer skies for both New York’s head coach and GM. A big part of that is what happens with Jaxson Dart, who was selected with influence from many close allies in Daboll’s circle—Joe Judge and Charlie Weis Jr.—thus making the selling points relative to Daboll’s preferences. Here we fast-forward to the end of a Giants season that, while more promising than a year ago, is probably going to need a diversion during the leaner weeks. New York’s out-of-division schedule includes dates with the entire NFC North and the AFC West. It likely won’t end in a playoff berth, but if it ends with a few salivating Dart starts, we will have a much rosier opinion on the 2026 season with another possibly strong draft class to support it.
11. Week 17: Pittsburgh Steelers at Cleveland Browns
I’ll group this game together with what I wrote about Jaxson Dart in Week 14 to ask an even bigger question about the 2025 season. Shedeur Sanders means a lot to different people but if you were to consolidate every team’s ranking of just his skill set, I imagine he’d settle in somewhere as a mid-second-round pick. Drew Brees was a second-round pick. Derek Carr was a second-round pick. Jake Plummer, Brett Favre and Andy Dalton were all second-round picks. Is it hard to imagine a world where a 40-year-old Joe Flacco doesn’t last through the season and Kenny Pickett struggles? If Sanders gets on the field for Cleveland at the end of this season and makes the most of mop-up duty, the Browns have a fascinating and consequential offseason on tap.
This article was originally published on www.si.com as 2025 NFL Schedule: The 13 Most Interesting Games of the Season.
