NFL schedule release 2019: Games and dates to know
The League is finally revealing its 2019 NFL schedule. Come Wednesday night at 8 p.m. ET, the league will be doing its big shows on NFL Network and ESPN2, breaking down all the matchups over the course of two hours.
So why should you care? Well, for starters, you find out when a road trip might be in order. If you have a team, you can gather when they play in a cool city or maybe hit the opposite coast. Hopefully for you, your team plays a road game in New Orleans or San Francisco.
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From a football standpoint, you start to see which teams are given advantages by the way the NFL schedule falls. For example, who has to go on the road for three consecutive games, or four contests in five weeks? Which teams are going to be catching a few opponents off bye weeks, and speaking of byes, who gets them early, who gets them at the midway pointing who gets them late?
Additionally, which teams are getting their home slate towards the end of the campaign? Certainly, there can be arguments about when a team would prefer to play the bulk of their hosting dates, but it seems a contender would want to be at home in December when the weather is getting cold and the playoff race is heating up.
It’s impossible to know where the hard and soft spots are in the schedule, what with parity and injuries, but we still get a hint of what’s to come. If nothing else, the docket being released is a good time to access which franchises are going to have to survive the early portion of the year, and which should be able to get off to a nice start.
Read: Mathematicians Working With League for Fairer Schedule
Ultimately, the schedule release is nothing more than letting teams know what the roadmap looks like. It doesn’t mean anything in the grand scheme, but it gives fans a more concrete looks at what lies ahead. Going into the release, the only thing we know is that the Chicago Bears host the Green Bay Packers on the opening Thursday of the year, while the New England Patriots are hosting the Week 1 Sunday night game. Beyond that, everything is a guessing game.
