A possible advantage for Ben Johnson’s team has emerged ahead of the official NFL schedule release
As the NFL world awaits the official schedule release for the upcoming 2025 season, Chicago Bears fans have already found ourselves treated to a couple of official announcements. Monday saw confirmed announcements that Caleb Williams and company will take part in two special holiday season games: Black Friday (November 28th) at Philadelphia on Amazon Prime and Saturday, December 20th vs. Green Bay on FOX. This has also led to speculation that the team could see action on Christmas Day in Washington as the Commanders are a 2025 opponent and are also scheduled to play Philadelphia as part of the December 20th doubleheader.
A natural companion topic to the holiday season, of course, is travel. Part of the conversation at this time of year turns to what teams will be travelling the most over the course of the coming season and how it might affect their expected performance on the field. After all, if football is “a game of inches”, surely the miles have to take a toll at some point. It turns out, there is a significant gap between the teams that will be traveling the most and the least this season, according to Bill Speros of Bookies:
NFL 2025-26 MILES TRAVELED
The 32 NFL teams will cover a total of 625,947 miles this season, averaging 19,561 per team, and 2,301 per trip. 6 NFL teams will travel more miles than it takes to go around the world.
Full Story, Team-By-Team Breakdown https://t.co/Fy1rsB6x1I pic.twitter.com/6pZY8ZjNTE
— Bill Speros (@billsperos) May 13, 2025
The good news is the Bears come in as the team travelling the 5th fewest distance this season at 12,522 total miles. Division rivals Green Bay and Detroit will be travelling very similar distances at 12,929 and 11,411 miles, respectively, with Minnesota (the only team in the division scheduled for international play) standing out as the outlier at 19,319 miles. All four teams do come in under the league average of 19,561 miles.
Other scheduled opponents of note for the Bears this season include Cincinnati at the fewest distance of just 8,753 miles and Baltimore at 10,647. On the high end, Washington (scheduled to play in Madrid, Spain) comes in at 21,363 miles, and the San Francisco 49ers are the Bears’ opponent with the highest mileage total at 28,363.
We’ll have to see how the schedule unfolds to predict how week-to-week travel may factor into game performance, but for now, it’s interesting to see these rankings and make comparisons with a general perspective in mind.