For the first time in the 2025 regular season, the NFL has implemented its flexible scheduling system to change the kickoff time of a game. On Thursday afternoon, the league announced that it has adjusted
the start times for a pair of Sunday games in Week 14, one of which involves the Green Bay Packers.
The Packers are scheduled to host the Chicago Bears at Lambeau Field on Sunday, December 7th, with the game originally set for 12:00 Noon Central Time on FOX. However, Thursday’s announcement pushes that game back to the late afternoon time slot, now kicking off at 3:25 PM instead. Moving out of that time slot is a game between the Cincinnati Bengals and Buffalo Bills, which swaps places and moves into the early afternoon.
The reasons for this change are clear. The Bears are leading the NFC North as of this writing, with their 7-3 record putting them a half-game up on the 6-3-1 Packers. That Week 14 contest will be a massive one for the race to win the division at the end of the season, and both teams are guaranteed to at least have winning records when the game is played.
It appears that FOX expected Bengals-Bills to be their best game of the day when the league’s schedule was released in May, but that is not the case thanks largely to Cincinnati’s struggles this season. The Bengals currently sit at 3-7, having gone 1-7 since Joe Burrow was injured in a week 2 win over the Jacksonville Jaguars. Even with Burrow on track to return between now and Week 14, Packers-Bears is a much more compelling matchup from the perspective of an unaffiliated football fan, given its importance in the division race and in the NFC playoff picture.
The other game on FOX in the late afternoon features the Los Angeles Rams and the Arizona Cardinals, and due to geographic concerns, that game could not move into the early time slot. That meant that Bills-Bengals had to be the game to move up to make room for Green Bay-Chicago. Expect Packers-Bears to get an extremely wide FOX audience that afternoon, with Rams-Cardinals likely limited to those teams’ local broadcast areas.
NBC’s Sunday Night Football game in Week 14 features the Houston Texans and Kansas City Chiefs, a game that could also have significant playoff implications for those two teams. While neither can potentially be leading their respective divisions by then, it should still be a significant enough game in the AFC, which helps explain why Packers-Bears did not move all the way into prime time. Additionally, the Packers have already played in a pair of SNF games this season, and NBC may have designs on flexing another game later on in the season instead.
