The Chiefs’ third-place 2026 schedule isn’t all it was cracked up to be

In addition to the ninth overall pick of April’s NFL Draft, the Kansas City Chiefs were set to get another benefit of their 6-11 finish: the elusive third-place schedule that is often perceived to be a significant advantage in the following season.

But that doesn’t always turn out exactly like we expect.

A year ago, the Chiefs ended up with the AFC’s No. 1 seed after turning in a 15-2 season that set a new franchise record. Based on the previous year’s regular-season records, Kansas City ended up with the 11th-hardest 2025 schedule, which included games against 10 2024 playoff teams.

But after recording a 6-11 record this season — and completely missing the playoffs — the Chiefs will face the fifth-hardest NFL schedule in 2026, facing nine 2025 playoff teams.

How could this happen? Several factors are at play.

• Just three of an NFL team’s 17 games are matchups between squads that finished in the same place within their own divisions. So just 18% of each team’s schedule has anything to do with its record in the previous season.
• Six of the remaining 14 games are fixed every year — a home and away game with each team’s three division rivals. In 2025, the AFC West put two teams into the playoffs.
• The final eight games are played against AFC and NFC divisions that rotate every year. In 2026, the Chiefs will play the AFC East — another division that put two teams into the postseason — and the NFC West, which had three of its teams make the playoffs.

So much for the third-place schedule.

There’s one other thing to note. What if we convert each team’s opponent record — the last column in the table — from a four-digit fraction to a letter grade that represents standard deviations from average? These are shown in the second column, serving the same purpose here that they do in school: providing an easy-to-understand quantitative analysis of the data. Scores with the same, adjacent or near-adjacent grades are measurably different, but not significantly different from each other. In other words, the B- grades (ranked second through fifth) aren’t really that much different from the C+ and C grades — but are significantly different from the C- grades that are ranked 23rd to 26th.

Does this mean we’ll stop making this comparison every season? No… not at all. There are still differences to be explored — especially when the Chiefs are near the top, while rivals like the Eagles are much closer to the bottom. But what the letter grades show us is that generally, the differences in schedule strength tend to be pretty minor.