With their record-setting quarterback and pop-star dating tight end, the Kansas City Chiefs were the NFL’s version of the Beatles last season.
This season Patrick Mahomes, Travis Kelce and the Chiefs will be as close to matching the Beatles’ “Eight Days a Week” as any NFL team in nearly 100 years.
Along with the traditional Sunday games, Kansas City is also set to play games this season on Monday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday and Saturday under the newly released schedule — an odd occurrence that has happened only once before in the NFL.
The Chiefs will be the first team since the 1927 New York Yankees — the football version, not the version with Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig that dominated the baseball diamond — to play games on six days of the week in a single season. Those NFL Yankees under coach Ralph Scott went 7-8-1 that season with a roster that featured Hall of Famer Red Grange and played every day other than Monday.
The increase of television packages and broadcast windows have given one of the NFL’s most high-profile franchises a most unusual schedule with a maximum of 11 games to be played on Sundays with at least two of those in prime time.
The Chiefs will open the season at home on Thursday night against the Baltimore Ravens on Sept. 5 in the traditional spot for the defending champions. They will also play twice on Monday nights (Oct. 7 against New Orleans and Nov. 4 against Tampa Bay) and then were tabbed for two of the newer broadcast windows to fill some of other days of the week.
Kansas City will host the Las Vegas Raiders in the second annual Black Friday game on Amazon Prime Video on Nov. 29 and was picked for the Christmas Day doubleheader on Netflix for a Wednesday game at Pittsburgh. The teams playing on Christmas in Week 17 were given Saturday games in Week 16 to get adequate rest, with Kansas City hosting Houston that day.
That gives the Chiefs games scheduled for every day of the week other than Tuesday.
The three other teams playing on Christmas — Pittsburgh, Houston and Baltimore — will all have games on five days of the week, missing only Tuesday and Friday. The only other team to do that in the modern NFL was the Philadelphia Eagles in 2021, when they played a Tuesday game postponed because of COVID, along with scheduled games that season on Sunday, Monday, Thursday and Saturday.REST UP
The defending NFC champion San Francisco 49ers find themselves on the short end of the stick when it comes to rest.
The Niners will face four teams coming off their bye weeks, tied for the most in a season since byes returned to the NFL in 1990, according to research from ESPN. Indianapolis faces three teams coming off byes.
The 49ers will have 22 fewer days of rest than their opponents this season, tied for the third-largest gap since the start of the eight-division format in 2002, according to ESPN. They will play Dallas, Kansas City, Buffalo and Seattle following byes for those teams but San Francisco does get a few extra days before the Super Bowl rematch with the Chiefs in Week 7 thanks to a Thursday night game the previous week.
The Ravens are at the other end of the equation with a league-high 16 more days off than their opponents thanks in part to games on Wednesday and Thursday. That’s the most extra days of rest for any team since 2002, according to ESPN.
New England is tied for the second-best rest disparity in that span with 13 extra days off.
There are 14 teams in all that will play multiple games this season with four days off or fewer thanks to the Black Friday game, the two Wednesday games for Christmas this year and rule changes put in place last season to allow teams to play multiple Thursday night short-week games.
