Pats Pulpit
The NFL announced its schedule for the upcoming season on Wednesday.
All 20 games for the New England Patriots in the 2025 NFL preseason and regular season have been announced for Mike Vrabel’s first year as the team’s head coach.
The Patriots will play six games in their division, four games each against opponents from the AFC North and NFC South, and select opponents from the AFC South, AFC West, and NFC East based on last year’s record in the regular season, plus games against the Washington Commanders, Minnesota Vikings, and New York Giants in the preseason.
On September 8, 2005, the New England Patriots celebrated their third Super Bowl in four seasons in front of the visiting Oakland Raiders. Tom Brady threw for over 300 yards and tossed two touchdowns, and Mike Vrabel registered a sack as the Patriots opened the season with a 30-20 victory. Patriots starting quarterback had just celebrated his third birthday.
Almost exactly two decades later, the 2025 Patriots will open their campaign against the Las Vegas Raiders. This time, Mike Vrabel will be the head coach for the Patriots while Tom Brady is a partial owner of the Raiders.
The Patriots will have a 16-week gap between meetings with the division rival Miami Dolphins. After facing off in the second week of the season, the teams will not see one another again until Week 18. The teams had a similar spread in 2022, meeting in Weeks 1 and 17.
With the first game happening in Miami in mid-September and the second happening in Foxboro in the first week of the new year, their weather forecasts could not be more different. According to Weather Underground, the average temperature in Miami on September 14 is almost 84 degrees. The average in Foxboro for January 4? Below 29 degrees. That makes for a 55-degree difference for the two games.
When the Patriots and Pittsburgh Steelers meet on Sunday, September 21 at Gillette Stadium, it will be the first time the two teams have met for an early afternoon game at the stadium... ever. The last time the Patriots were the home team for a 1 p.m. start against the Steelers was December 8, 1974. The teams also met in Foxboro at 12:30pm on January 5, 1997 in the AFC Divisional Round as the stadium filled with fog.
The two teams have met seven times at Gillette Stadium. Three of those contests were in the late afternoon slot on Sunday. Three of those were primetime season openers with the Patriots raising banners, once each on Monday night (2002), Thursday night (2015), and Sunday night (2019). The remaining meeting was in the 2016 AFC Championship Game that kicked off at 6:30 p.m. ET.
For the first time since 2020, the Patriots will play three consecutive road games. For the first time since 2017, they will play...
