Circle Your Calendars: These Are the Most Important Games of the 2025 NFL Season
Looking at the games most likely to swing both teams' playoff and Super Bowl odds, for better or for worse.
The 2025 NFL season starts Thursday night with the defending champion Philadelphia Eagles hosting the archrival Dallas Cowboys — and whenever those two teams get together, it seems like it always descends into what I once called “an ugly, magnificent bloodbath” in the NFC East. But the Cowboys’ recent Micah Parsons trade has perhaps taken a little bit of the shine off of the opening-night matchup.
Looking at my preseason NFL forecast simulations, the result of the game projects to swing the two teams’ Super Bowl odds by a total of around +/- 2 percentage points — 1.68 on average for Philly,1 0.35 for Dallas — which is below the overall average of +/- 2.4 total points for any given game on the 2025 NFL schedule overall. Bitter rivalries and season-opening fanfare aside, we can do better than Birds-’Boys in terms of raw importance.
So then, if not the opener, what is the most impactful game of Week 1? And for that matter, what are the most important games of the regular season overall?
