Bears Launch Schedule Prediction Challenge That Nobody Will Win

If you thought filling out your NCAA bracket was tough, wait until yet get a load of what the NFL and the Chicago Bears have in mind.

Think you have what it takes to guess who we're playing & when? 🔮

Enter our Schedule Prediction Challenge for the chance to win two tickets to every Bears regular-season home & away game

— Chicago Bears (@BearsLocal) April 16, 2024

Chicago’s annual schedule prediction challenge is underway, and the odds of winning are astronomical. Here are the details from the team’s flagship website:

How difficult is this challenge? There are exponentially more potential permutations to the league’s 272-game regular season than there are grains of sand in a human-sized hourglass. In fact, the NFL schedule is drastically more complex than those of the NBA and Major League Baseball, even though those leagues play far more games. But here are a few things to keep in mind.

1. The NFL has more than 10,000 scheduling constraints, including logistical considerations like stadium availability, broadcasting rules, and even special requests made by individual teams.
2. One team’s schedule can be constructed roughly 60 trillion ways when merely considering the sequence of 17 opponents. They’ll also face the Rams, Seahawks, Jaguars, Titans, Panthers, and Patriots at home. One of those games will be played in London, however.
3. Chicago will travel to play the Cardinals, 49ers, Texans, Colts, and Commanders. I believe the Bears and Commanders will play in Week 1, but that’s just a guess.
4. You do know each of the Bears’ opponents going into the challenge, though that’s little help. The Bears play their NFC North opponents twice, once at home and once on the road.
5. The NFL frowns on scheduling divisional opponents in back-to-back weeks.
6. You have a 1-in-9 chance of predicting the correct bye week, so that’s not so bad.
7. You have a 1-in-6 chance of guessing the final opponent since it will be a division rival, home or away, which is even better.
8. The Bears will not open the season with three straight road games. The NFL will not allow that, though there is that London tilt.
9. Chicago is also prevented from playing four consecutive road games at any time. That London game creates some added intrigue again, however.
10. The Bears cannot play two consecutive road games against opponents coming off of a bye week, though I’m not sure if that helps or not.
11. Games will be played on Sundays. Mondays, Thursdays, and Saturdays this year. Christmas is on a Wednesday this year and the league wants to connect to viewers on that holiday with two scheduled games. That will affect games before that week and after, if so.

Let’s take a look at how difficult it is to correctly predict an NCAA bracket. If you’re guessing blindly, you have a (1/2)^63 chance of picking 63 NCAA tournament games correctly—that’s roughly 1 in 9.2 quintillion. Mathematician Jeff Bergen, though, estimates the odds of constructing a perfect bracket as closer to 1 in 128 billion, since you have a much-better-than-50-50 chance of picking a bunch of specific games (such as the ones between No. 1 and No. 16 seeds).

When creating an NFL schedule, each time you pick an opponent, your odds narrow. That’s the good news. Ready for the bad news? My calculations tell me that the odds of correctly predicting Chicago’s entire schedule (location and date) even knowing its opponents, is about 1-in-12 trillion. That’s probably a little light, too. Especially if you factor in flex scheduling, potential natural disasters, and stadium conflicts, like concerts. The odds of winning the Powerball are 1 in 292.2 million.