During the 2025 NFL season, the Dallas Cowboys will be facing one of the most brutal schedules in NFL history. Not only will they become the first team in league history to play six consecutive games against teams that all won at least 11 games in the prior season, but they also got hit with a brutal scheduling quirk that the NFL actually tried to eliminate this year. 

Starting in Week 11, the Cowboys will have to play a total of three games in 10 days, which is notable, because they’re the ONLY team in the NFL that will be asked to play three games in a 10-day span this year. During the 2024 season, a total of nine teams ended up playing three games in 10 days and things got ugly: The nine teams combined to go 11-16. 

Of that total, four of the nine teams ended up going 0-3 (Bears, Seahawks, Saints, Steelers). 

It’s a scheduling quirk that the NFL tried to avoid for 2025, according to NFL VP of broadcasting Onnie Bose. 

“There’s a general effort, if it’s not ideal, we don’t want to do it, kind of like a three-game road trip or certain other things we see, like a road game after a road Monday night game,” Bose told SI.com in a recent interview. “We call these ‘scheduling inequities’ that we keep track of, that we try to minimize. But they’re not off the table — you’ll never have a four-game road trip and you try not to have a three-game road trip.”

Unfortunately for the Cowboys, the NFL was forced to have exactly ONE team play three games in 10 days this year. That just ended up being Dallas, which will be doing it for the SECOND straight season. 

“Now it happens to the Cowboys,” Bose said. “Part of that for the Cowboys, I’m not implying this is the reason why, but they were going to be home on Thursday for Thanksgiving and the way the schedule fell out, with that Monday night game two weeks prior, it’s how it came through.”

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Not only do the Cowboys have to play three games in 10 days, but two of those games are against the two teams that made the Super Bowl last year: Philadelphia and Kansas City. 

Also, the brutal stretch starts with a trip to Las Vegas, which means they have to turn around and face the Eagles on a short week before facing the Chiefs on an even shorter week: 

• Week 11 (Monday): at Raiders
• Week 12 (Sunday): Eagles
• Week 13 (Thursday): Chiefs (Thanksgiving)

The only upside for the Cowboys is that they will have a Week 10 bye before starting this brutal stretch. In 2024, there were two teams (Ravens and Texans) that got a bye before playing three games in 10 days and they went a combined 4-2. Also, the Jets played three games in 10 days starting in Week 1, so they were fresh, and they went 2-1. That means the three teams with rest went 6-3 while the other six teams combined to go 5-13. 

The Cowboys were one of the teams that played three games in 10 days last season and went 2-1, so at least they know what they’re getting into. 

The Cowboys will be making a lot of history this year: Besides everything we’ve mentioned, they’ll also become the first team in NFL history to play four Thursday games in a single season. Not to mention, they’re the first team since 2011 to be scheduled for the Thursday night opener plus a Thanksgiving game plus a Christmas game. 

If you love scheduling quirks, we have 22 more of them that you can check out here.