Understanding Strength of Schedule: How Difficult is the Chiefs' Path in 2026?

The entire 2026-27 NFL schedule will be released on Thursday night, but teams already have a good idea of how steep their challenges will be in the upcoming season.

The Kansas City Chiefs' opponents for 2026 have been set since the end of the 2025 season. The Chiefs will play their three AFC West rivals twice while also taking on the entire AFC East and NFC West. With a rare third-place finish in the division, Kansas City will play their fellow third-place finishers from the AFC North, AFC South and NFC South — the Cincinnati Bengals, Indianapolis Colts, and Atlanta Falcons, respectively.

The NFC West was a juggernaut last season, with the 14-win Seattle Seahawks edging out the 12-win Los Angeles Rams and San Francisco 49ers, while the AFC East hosted the AFC Champion New England Patriots and 12-win Buffalo Bills.

So, did the Chiefs get a tougher-than-expected schedule for 2026? It depends on how you run the numbers.

Understanding the Kansas City Chiefs' 2026 strength of schedule

To properly understand the Chiefs' actual strength of schedule for the 2026 season, there are two methodologies worth understanding.

As seen in the example shared by the NFL's social media accounts, a team's strength of schedule can be estimated by using opponent win percentages from the prior season. By this metric, the Chiefs have the fifth-hardest schedule in 2026 with a 2025 opponent win percentage of .536.

However, that methodology has a problem.

By using last year's win percentages, there's no accounting for offseason changes, previous injury woes or a long list of potential team-altering factors. (For example, the 6-11 Chiefs had a win percentage of .353 last season. The 7-10 Miami Dolphins earned a .412. The Chiefs are widely expected to outperform the Dolphins in 2026.)

To use a more predictive method, Sebastian Carl (@mrcaseb on Twitter/X) used projected win totals from prominent sportsbooks to account for how teams are expected to perform in 2026 rather than relying on their 2025 results.

With this methodology, the Chiefs plummet to the 26th-hardest schedule, or seventh-easiest! Carl's calculations give the Chiefs' opponents a projected .492 win percentage — a significant drop from the .536 from the teams' 2025 seasons.

As Carl noted, an even better way of evaluating a team's schedule will come closer to the beginning of the year, when each game has a betting line, allowing game-by-game projection.

Ultimately, neither of these methods guarantee anything once the season actually begins, and the Chiefs' own expectations (often receiving a 2026 over/under of 10.5) factor into their opponents' projections as well. Still, it's worth understanding the numbers and properly setting expectations ahead of the new year.

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