And why we love it.
People care WAY more about the official NFL schedule releases than they should, but I kind of get it. And I kind of get it because it’s NOT just a list of who plays who, because the NFL schedule is loaded with minefields, and the NFL loves nothing more than threatening all of us with all of their nonsense. And they have SO MUCH NONSENSE to threaten us with.
Baseball can’t really do this as they simply need to cram all 162 games into the time frame allotted, with only the Fourth of July and Memorial Day standing out as holidays to work with or around. While basketball has Christmas Day, they also have so many games that there’s a limit to how much nonsense they can inject into the scheduling system. The NFL, though. With just seventeen games, they can really mess with us, Four-ish major holidays! Enormous rest and travel distance disparities! Germany! Brazil! AUSTRALIA! They can make you play on Thursday, or on Christmas, or in England. They can give you a long flight out west on short rest, or a trip to Lambeau for a warm-weather squad in January. Basically, they can and will screw you in dozens of ways, and it’s more a matter of how much screwing there will be, than if there is any screwing at all.
The NFL is also greatly aided by the insane American stacking of holidays in the late fall and winter months, where Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Year’s Day, and to a lesser extent, even Halloween have an impact on whether your game will disrupt a traditional family gathering, or not, or turn into a big costume party. Some people enjoy having the Packers as a part of their Thanksgiving day, but I am personally not a fam. Granted, I don’t really care for Thanksgiving as a holiday in the first place, but I’d rather be taking in my Packer game from my own couch on my own time versus awkwardly shoehorning it into a visit to my Minnesota relatives. We already know the Packers will be playing the Bears five days before Christmas. Last year, every team that played in that slot also played on Christmas, and so we wait with bated breath to see if we’ll have a white Lambeau Christmas this year.
And of course, there is now the specter of international travel. The Packers were sent to Brazil for the season opener last year, and while they are not expected to travel this year, Dublin was looking like a real possibility for quite some time and is apparently on the table for 2026. While the NFL has an interest in growing the game internationally, they also get to add this drama to schedule release day, and hey, it’s not fair! They steal a home game, impose insane travel onto a few teams, and often put those teams on inadequate playing surfaces where people can get hurt. It’s nice to have the occasional Jaguars game on at 9 in the morning to kick off the day, but it’s horrible to have my team playing overseas and incurring all of the risks involved. Who knows if they’ll even be let back in!
And of course, if you’re a Packer fan, there is the one added bit of drama that no other team has: The Green v. Gold package. With the general public and Green package ticketholders convinced that the Gold package actually costs the team several home-field advantage points, everyone holds out hope that it will not come against the Bears or Vikings, and to a lesser extent, the Lions.
The NFL has unprecedented power to mess with everyone via the schedule, and so they do what they do best. They inject drama into what should be pro forma. They create a media event out of something that should be the most boring activity possible. They’re simply phenomenal at this. I’m honestly surprised the Packers haven’t already added Santa Cheese Beards to the Pro Shop. But I suppose that would be a giveaway.