Last year, the San Francisco 49ers arguably had a much easier NFL schedule than they do in 2019.
Case in point, the Niners had just one trip to the Eastern Time Zone, while this year features four such trips. And four of the final five games on the calendar are against teams which made the playoffs a season ago.
In case you were wondering, San Francisco’s 2019 regular-season schedule looks like this:
An early bye week in the year does no favors either. Typically, most teams prefer it in the middle of the season or later.