Good morning, Bears fans!
I don’t care if it’s just receivers running routes in shorts and beanies, give me all of the practice videos the official team accounts posted on Monday.
— Kevin Kaduk
01 NFL 2026
Schedule release pushed to week of May 18?
That’s the rumor after comments from an NFL VP surfaced on a Bills podcast. The schedule has been released the second week of May in recent years.
02 Stadium News
Illinois Senate reconvenes today
Buckle up: 26 days and counting to get the Arlington Heights deal done and right now the governor’s office says the homeowner tax relief in the bill is “negligible.” More from the Sun-Times.
03 NFC North
Packers sign Tyrod Taylor
Out goes Malik Willis, in comes the 16-year NFL vet who will turn 37 in August. Taylor has started games for six different teams and a seventh would tie him with Brian Hoyer for third on the all-time list. (Ryan Fitzpatrick is first with nine teams while current Bears QB Case Keenum is second with eight.)
How the Bears schedule gets made each season
The 2026 NFL schedule release is reportedly being held up over a five-game rights package the league is still shopping to YouTube, Netflix and others.
The laborious process of placing 272 games over 18 weeks, five main broadcast partners, seven countries, four continents and almost 600 game windows?
The NFL has that down to a science.
Not that it still doesn’t take a lot of effort between man and machine for a process that was previously confined to a cork board.
A few more numbers from a 2023 Amazon Web Services article that put the entire operation in perspective:
Six NFL executives endure a hands-on three-month sprint after the Super Bowl to get the job done. The group includes Mike North, the league’s VP of broadcast planning. (Not Pappy.)
The humans are assisted by more than 4,000 AWS cloud servers, all running simultaneously to find about 50,000 feasible schedules (i.e.: Nothing that involves putting the Jets on Sunday Night Football).
The league has uploaded more than 20,000 rules, including restrictions on road games, time zone crossings and strict instructions that all of America loves watching the NFC East in primetime.
There are 824 trillion possible game combinations that satisfy the league’s basic rules, according to a researcher at Carnegie Mellon.
In the end, one schedule is released to the public.
This process has undoubtedly evolved as artificial intelligence has improved, though specifics haven’t yet been made public.
One thing that’s still certain is that humans still have the first and final say. It starts with setting the kickoff game at the home of the defending Super Bowl champion, continues with figuring out who’s headed overseas and who gets flexed later in the season.
Following last season, the league is probably pushing the algorithmic throttle toward maxing out Caleb Williams and the Bears on the main stage. That probably means more than the one Sunday Night Football game they got in 2024 and landing on either Thanksgiving or Christmas.
But right now, it’s unclear whether even the NFL workers can say for certain. The answer could still well be up in the cloud.
Steve Lamberti is the third Bears By 7 reader to successfully refer four friends and earn a shoutout in this space. Thank you, Steve!
Now, Steve’s name might be a familiar one to Illinois basketball fans. Prior to a coaching career at Plainfield Central, Steve starred at Streamwood and Augustana University in the late ‘90s/’00s.
And if we’re going waaaay back, he was a teammate of a certain newsletter writer at Tefft Middle School. That’s me wearing the Sweetness digits. Steve’s in the middle of the same row.
Anyway, you should be like Steve.
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• Austin Reed’s UFL career has hit a rocky patch after a nice start. (Bear Goggles On)
• Bears veterans give rookie advice on minicamp. (ChicagoBears.com)
• Ben Johnson the 13th best coach in the NFL? Please. (Da Windy City)
• Luis Medina celebrate May The Fourth with a look at Caleb Williams’ performance in the fourth quarters his first two seasons. (Bleacher Nation Bears)
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