The 2026 NFL schedule dropped on May 14, and with OTAs running and training camp circled for July 22, every front office now knows exactly which 17 games sit on its calendar. For the 18 teams that didn’t make the 2025 playoffs, the schedule release is the last big variable in deciding whether the offseason work translates into January. Roster moves are done. Draft picks are signed. The only thing left was the calendar, and now that piece is in.<\/p>\n
Strength-of-schedule rankings always come with a warning label. They are built on the prior year’s winning percentages, and the prior year almost never predicts the next year cleanly. Still, the rotation tells you something. The AFC East drew the NFC North and the AFC West, which combined for the toughest division-wide slate in the league. The NFC South pulled the AFC South and the NFC East, a much softer set of opponents on paper. Those two facts alone reshape the conversation about which non-playoff teams have a realistic shot at flipping their fortunes.<\/p>\n
The Dallas Cowboys<\/a> closed 2025 outside the bracket, drafted heavily on the offensive line, and added two veteran pieces in free agency. Their 2026 schedule gives them the NFC South and AFC South in the cross-divisional rotation, which means winnable games on paper against Atlanta, Carolina, Houston, and Jacksonville. The division itself is still the obstacle.<\/p>\n Philadelphia is the defending NFC East champion, and Washington has a healthy quarterback for the first time in two years. But the path is there. Strength-of-schedule projections from ESPN<\/a> and PFF have Dallas with one of the league’s 10 softest slates, and a few primetime games in November will tell us whether the trenches actually held.<\/p>\n The New York Jets are a more complicated read. The schedule is rough. Sharing a division with Buffalo and Miami while drawing the NFC North and AFC West means trips to Detroit, Green Bay, Kansas City, and Denver before the bye. Their offseason was busy, particularly on defense, and the rookie quarterback situation is finally settled after two years of churn. The problem is the road. Five of their first nine games are away from MetLife, and three of those are against 2025 playoff teams.<\/p>\n If the Jets<\/a> are going to climb back into contention, it will not be early. They will need a December run, and the schedule does at least give them a back half with three home games in four weeks.<\/p>\n Philadelphia lost in the wild card round in 2025 after winning the Super Bowl the year before, which is a sentence nobody saw coming 12 months ago. They are arguably the most talented team on this list, and the schedule is reasonable. The NFC East still has Dallas and Washington pushing back hard, but the Eagles’ non-division slate includes Carolina, New Orleans, the Giants, Tennessee, and Indianapolis, all of which they should be favored against.<\/p>\n The bounce-back projection is built into early futures markets, which is part of why the betting line on their win total opened high.<\/p>\n There is also the quieter case for a team like the Atlanta Falcons<\/a>. They missed the playoffs by one game in 2025, drafted to fix their pass rush, and ended up with a schedule that gives them six games against teams that finished below .500 last year. The Falcons are the type of team that doesn’t generate national coverage in May but routinely appears in the playoff picture by Thanksgiving. Their primetime exposure is low, which is a side effect of how the league assigns those slots, but the math on their winnable games is favorable.<\/p>\n A few patterns become clear when you stack the eighteen non-playoff teams against their 2026 calendars. Teams that drew the NFC South or AFC South in the cross-divisional rotation got the easier draw. Teams stuck rotating through the NFC North or AFC West face an uphill climb regardless of how their offseason looked. And the late-season schedule matters more than the opening month. Playoff seeding is decided in December, and the teams with home games in Weeks 15 through 17 against beatable opponents tend to be the ones that close strong.<\/p>\n How betting markets are pricing these early turnaround candidates depends on more than the schedule, of course. Roster construction, coaching changes, and quarterback health all carry weight, and sharp money tends to wait for August before committing. For a deeper look at how schedule difficulty and roster turnover factor into early-season prices, betting strategies<\/a> from The Sports Geek cover the variables that move win totals before week one.<\/p>\n Training camp opens July 22. Until then, the schedule is the freshest data point. For Dallas, the Jets, Philadelphia, Atlanta, and a few others, the next two months will be about turning that calendar into a believable comeback story.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The 2026 NFL schedule has dropped and OTAs are under way for a handful of teams. Which teams should we be keeping an eye on this year?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1675,"featured_media":250591,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_lmt_disableupdate":"no","_lmt_disable":"","sfio_featured_image":false,"sfio_embed_code":"","_ef_editorial_meta_date_first-draft-date":"","_ef_editorial_meta_paragraph_assignment":"","_ef_editorial_meta_checkbox_needs-photo":"","_ef_editorial_meta_number_word-count":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[6431],"tags":[34854],"class_list":["post-284408","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-nfl-teams","tag-2026-nfl-schedule"],"modified_by":"Drew Crabtree","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/284408","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1675"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=284408"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/284408\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":284412,"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/284408\/revisions\/284412"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/250591"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=284408"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=284408"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=284408"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}The Cowboys Land in the Most Interesting spot<\/h3>\n
The Jets Drew the Brutal Calendar<\/h3>\n
Philadelphia is the Obvious Bounce-Back Pick<\/h3>\n
Atlanta is the Quieter Case Worth Tracking<\/h3>\n
What the Patterns Tell Us<\/h3>\n