Creating the NFL’s regular season schedule is no easy task. All 32 teams will need to play according to their divisional positioning, cross-conference alignments, and also have to play one game each on Thursday and Monday. Contests in London and — at least if the playing surface holds — Mexico City need to be taken into consideration, as need potential requests from the franchises. This can create plenty of oddities.
Take the Chicago Bears, for example, who played on Sunday night and will have their next contest on Thursday. Or the entire AFC East: for the first time since the league’s divisional alignment took place in 2002, the entire division had the same week off.