The Packers’ schedule this year is stupid, and the stupidity kicks into high gear this week.
With seven weeks remaining, the Packers have played just one of their six divisional games, meaning their final
five are jammed into the last month and a half of the season. This is dumb and stupid and wrong for many reasons, both aesthetic and structural.
Divisions have outsized importance in the landscape of the NFL. The easiest way into the playoffs is to win your division, and the NFL will award you with a home playoff game for your trouble if you manage to do so. The online debate over whether or not that’s a good thing rages on, but it’s the way things are for right now, so that’s the structure we have to live within.
But if the NFL is going to make things be this way, it shouldn’t cheapen a team’s divisional schedule by stacking so many divisional games late in the season. Teams grow and change, for better and for worse, over the course of a season, and putting so many games against divisional opponents so close together ensures the Packers will play essentially the same “version” of the Vikings twice. There’s no growth or change between these games because they happen so close together.
But that’s what happens when you have to wait until Week 12 to see one of your divisional opponents for the first time, which is true of both the Vikings and the Chicago Bears this year; the Packers play the Bears for the first time this year in Week 14.
And as dumb as it is to not see the Vikings or Bears until this late in the season, it’s worse that the Packers will wrap up their annual series with the Lions before they see the Bears for the first time. They play the Vikings this week, then meet the Lions on Thanksgiving to cap off their home-and-home series. That just feels wrong. You should always complete your divisional circuit at least once before you play anyone in your division a second time.
But worst of all is this: the Packers are going to play the Bears twice in three weeks.
They’ll line up against the Bears at Lambeau Field in Week 14, and then they’ll see them again in Week 16 in Chicago. The exact date for the Week 16 tilt is still up in the air, but if it ends up being on Saturday, that means less than two weeks — just 13 days — will have passed between the Packers’ two games with their oldest rival.
Imagine if Jordan Love or Caleb Williams faces an injury that knocks them out for just a month. That’d be bad enough on its own, but even a relatively moderate injury — Jordan Love’s knee issue last year, for instance — shouldn’t be enough to significantly alter two games between two the NFL’s oldest and most popular franchises. That’s bad schedule design!
(The Packers aren’t the only victim of this particular scheduling quirk, for what it’s worth. The Giants and Eagles also met twice in a three-week span earlier this year, though their games took place 17 days apart because one of them happened on Thursday Night Football.)
It doesn’t have to be this way, and it shouldn’t. No doubt this isn’t a league-wide problem, but the Packers sure seem to have been victimized by schedule stupidity this year. Let’s hope 2026 treats their NFC North slate a little better.
