One of the unique traits that separates the NFL from other team sports is its miniature schedule.
This isn’t the NBA, where strength of schedule is essentially a non-factor since every team will face each of the other 29 teams at least twice. In the NFL, each team faces just 14 of the other 31 squads in the league—less than half. This leads to enormous variance in schedule difficulty.
Look at the 2025 season, for instance. The New England Patriots faced the easiest schedule in the NFL, with their opponents winning just 39.1% of their games, while the Tennessee Titans faced the hardest schedule, with their opponents winning 57.4% of their games.
Schedule variance in the NFL often makes it apples-to-oranges to compare one team or player against another without taking opponent quality into context. That’s why it is always worthwhile to check in on strength-of-schedule metrics, whether it’s for evaluating the past or projecting the future.
So, as we sit here on Sept. 3 with 10 days to go until the New York Jets’ season opener, what type of road ahead are the Jets projected to face?
A relatively easy one.
Well, at least, if you buy into Vegas’ win-total projections.
According to Sharp Football Analysis, the Jets have the NFL’s fourth-easiest schedule going into 2026, based on Vegas-forecasted win totals. In the AFC, their schedule ranks second-easiest, trailing only the Cincinnati Bengals.
- Detroit Lions
- Cincinnati Bengals
- New Orleans Saints
- New York Jets
- Baltimore Ravens
Here is a look at the Jets’ schedule and the current win-total projections for each opponent.
Combined, the Jets’ opponents project to go 139.5-149.5 (.483).
The Jets’ fourth-place ranking is due to facing many teams expected to be very bad, which tanks the overall projected record of their schedule, despite facing plenty of good teams.
In fact, 10 of the Jets’ 17 opponents are projected to have a winning record. However, four of those teams are only projected for 9.5 wins, and none are projected for more than 10.5. Meanwhile, the Jets will face five teams with projected win totals of 5.5 or fewer.
For a Jets team with a lowly 5.5 over-under themselves, this schedule makeup is actually a positive sign for their ability to go over their win total. They’ll get five games against teams viewed as similarly or less competitive, with three of those at home.
If they can take care of business across those five games, the Jets won’t have to steal many wins across the other 12 contests to get over 5.5 wins, which would be enough to double their 2025 win total.
Of course, this strength-of-schedule projection is merely just that: a projection. Many unexpected things will happen throughout the season. Teams expected to struggle will thrive, and vice versa.
With that said, using win-total projections is a more accurate way to predict a team’s upcoming strength of schedule than the most common method of using the previous season’s records. This way, we at least account for the changes each team made in the offseason.
On that note, it’s at least mildly promising for Jets fans to see the team have one of the two easiest projected slates in their conference, even if we know that the actual strength-of-schedule rankings are bound to look much different than the pre-season projections.
