I don't generally get swept away by the hype of the NFL's schedule release, which occurred last week. After all, a the team's opponents for the next season are set as soon as the current season ends. The only real sources of mild interest are when the bye week will happen and how many primetime games the team might have/when I need to plan around a Thursday game.
However, in looking over the league schedule for the new year, there was a trend this year that we haven't seen in years of the recent past: an emphasis on earlier divisional play.
In recent years, the NFL has tended to ease into the schedule by putting nonconference or nondivisional matchups earlier in the season, presumably with the philosophy that the divisional games have the heaviest impact on playoff seeding, and thus should be saved until later in the season for additional drama.
This philosophy, though, can have some undesirable effects. I think most would agree that divisional games are always more fun when both teams still have something to play for. Unfortunately, the later you get into the season, the more likely it is that some teams (*cough*thebears*cough*) are going to be mathematically eliminated. So why wait and cram the majority of divisional games into the second half of the season?
In addition, if fan engagement is one of the things the NFL wants to consider when putting together their league schedule, there are few better ways to hype up the start of a new season than to have a lot of rivalry games right off the bat.
That seems to be what the NFL has done this year.
In week one of the regular season, eight of the 16 games are between divisional opponents. Now, this might not seem like a lot. But: in 2024, that number was two. In 2023 there were five. In 2022 there were four. In 2021 there was just one.
You get the point. This is something we haven't in a very long time. I went back about 15 years through Week One schedules just to see the trends, and the most divisional games in a week one was five, which happened just a couple times. So clearly this is a conscious shift on the part of the NFL.
Personally, I love it. Yes, the counterargument is going to be that teams are not yet at their full strength early in the season, but I think there's something to be said for adding some extra importance and urgency to those early games. It also prevents some of the risk of these extremely important games having a damper put on them later in the season by the injuries that are inevitably going to occur.
If nothing else, it's good to see the league trying to shake some things up a little bit and go against the scheduling philosophy that it has had for those week one games for most of the last decade and a half (at least; that's only as far as I looked). For me, it adds a little more anticipation to that first week of the regular season!