Baltimore Ravens among a handful of teams that NFL schedule makers gave one key advantage to for the third straight year

Like most things related to the NFL offseason, the buzz around the NFL’s annual schedule release has swelled in recent years. This past week’s schedule drop has allowed for analysts to comb through the quirks of holiday games, primetime opportunities, and more. One such layer to the growth in recent schedule analysis that has gained significant attention? Net rest days.

What are “rest days”? When two teams play on a Sunday and one opponent played the previous Sunday while the other played the previous Thursday, the squad coming off of the Thursday night game the week prior will enter the following week’s matchup with three extra days of rest ahead of the game. Add this up across 18 weeks and an endless supply of Mondays, Thursdays, bye weeks, and more? Teams ultimately collect significant variance in the amount of rest advantage they can claim against their opponents between games across a full season.

The Baltimore Ravens will play this season with five extra days of rest versus their opponents on the schedule. That is tied for the 7th-best mark in the NFL based on the 2025 season’s schedule results. That’s a nifty advantage for the Ravens to have in their margins, but it is not the full story here.

The schedule makers didn’t just smile upon the Ravens this year — they’ve done so three years running. Only two other NFL franchises besides Baltimore can claim to have been given more net rest throughout their regular season schedule than their opponents in each of the last three seasons: the Dallas Cowboys and the New England Patriots.

What Baltimore ultimately does with this advantage is, of course, to be determined. Baltimore boasted a league-best +16 net rest days in 2024 and had the sixth-best total of teams in 2023 (+9) while winning a combined 25 games in the regular season. Neither season provided the Ravens with the ultimate prize, as both teams would fall short late in the postseason with frustrating, narrow losses. But throughout the NFL’s annual marathon, having every marginal advantage you can find can only help the cause, and Baltimore can be glad to have this one in their corner once again in 2025.