Browns get hit with brutal NFL scheduling quirk in Week 6 that only one other team has faced in league history

Why the Week 6 schedule doesn’t really seem fair for Cleveland

By John Breech

When the 2025 NFL schedule came out in May, the Cleveland Browns should have filed a protest and asked the league to redo Week 6, because the Browns have been hit with a brutal scheduling quirk that only one other team in NFL history has ever had to face.

The Browns will be going into Week 6 coming off an international game in London, and they’ll be facing a Steelers team coming off a bye week. It’s a setup the NFL tries to avoid, which is why this is only the second time this has ever happened.

Let’s take a quick look at the one previous game where a team that played in Europe had to face a team coming off a bye.

Falcons at Dolphins (Week 7, 2021)

During the 2021 season, the Dolphins were sent to London to play the Jaguars in Week 6. In Week 7, they were forced to play a Falcons team that was coming off a Week 6 bye. It’s hard to say if the London trip had any impact, but the Dolphins fell behind 20-7 early in the game. In the fourth quarter, the Falcons took a 27-14 lead before Miami was able to storm back, but in the end, the Dolphins’ ended up losing, 30-28, on a field goal as time expired.

This is the only instance in NFL history where a team played in Europe one week and then faced a team coming off a bye the next week.

The first London game was played back in 2007, and for the first nine years of the series, getting stuck in a situation like this wouldn’t have even been possible because every team sent abroad was given a bye after their international game.  In 2016, the Colts decided they didn’t WANT a bye after their London game — because they didn’t want it so early in the season — and since then, the NFL has allowed teams to request whether they want the bye after playing abroad. (The Steelers were on a bye in Week 6 following their international game in Ireland in Week 5.)

Although the Browns are only the second team to play in Europe and face a team coming off a bye, there are two other instances where a team played an international game in North America and then had to play a team coming off a bye the following week. Unfortunately for the Browns, those teams went 0-2. If you throw in Miami’s loss, that means no team has ever won a game in the situation that Cleveland will find itself in Sunday against Pittsburgh.

Let’s take a look at the other instances where this happened:

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