The Philadelphia Eagles have a deservedly tough schedule this year. When you win your division, you get to play some of the other division winners the next year. It’s part of what makes the NFL have so much parity, and it’s what makes winning back-to-back Super Bowls so difficult. On top of that, the Eagles are also playing the AFC West and the NFC North, which are two good divisions.
One thing that can make a tough schedule easier is how far a team has to travel. Luckily, the Eagles don’t have to do a whole lot of that, compared to other teams in the league.
2025 will be a rocky road, but a short one.
We live in a world where there are people who look up everything you don’t want to. This time, it was Bill Speros of Bookies.com who ranked every team by the distance that they have to travel in the 2025 season. Why did he do it? Who knows. Is it cool that he did it? Absolutely, yes.
Thirty-two NFL teams will travel 625,947 miles this season. Here is the breakdown, via @billsperos: pic.twitter.com/WJ2sU5hrVG
— Adam Schefter (@AdamSchefter) May 13, 2025
To do the calculations, Speros used Google Earth to measure the distance between the team’s stadiums. So, the Eagles going to Northwest stadium to play the Commanders is a 127-mile trip.
The two teams that are on either side of the rankings are the Chargers and the Bengals. Los Angeles has to travel 37,086 miles, and Cincinnati has to go 8,753 miles; it’s a pretty huge range.
The Eagles are ranked at 22, only having to travel 15,924 miles with an average trip length of 1,769 miles.
Obviously, when and where those trips are is a big factor in all of this, but travelling distance is pretty important. The Eagles’ 2024 schedule worked out so that they didn’t have to get on a plane from after Week 12 until their trip to New Orleans for the Super Bowl. That was 10 straight weeks of easy living.
In those 10 weeks, the Eagles had a 9-1 record. The lack of travel and the winning were probably more of a correlation than it was a causation thing, but it still must have played a little part.
Now, one thing to keep in mind this season is that not only are the Eagles trying to win back-to-back Super Bowls, but they’re also trying to end the 20-year curse of no team winning back-to-back NFC East championships.
We can just ignore the New York Giants in that conversation because they’re a lethal combination of a poverty franchise and a talent-sucking black hole. That leaves us with the Cowboys and Commanders.
The Cowboys are always going to have a higher travel distance because they are the least east, East team. They’re also pretty much smack dab in the middle of the country (longitude-wise), so that makes an AFC West schedule not super terrible for them.
Because of that, they’re actually also pretty much smack dab in the middle of the rankings at 15. They have to go 18,897 miles and have an average trip of 2,099 (average trip to the Northeast is 2,603 miles).
The Commanders are probably the Eagles' biggest threat in the NFC East this season, and they’re ranked at No. 11 with 21,363 miles and an average trip of 2,373 miles. In Week 11, they play in Madrid, Spain. That’s what really makes their number spike.
Regardless, they’re going to be travelling the most out of any team in the NFC East by kind of a lot. Just cross your fingers and hope that they do the dumb thing where they go across the ocean late in the week, and/or they decide not to take their bye week afterward.
Again, the distance a team has to travel doesn’t necessarily play the biggest part in how well they’re going to do in any given season, but it’s not nothing. When you’re talking about having a mega-tough schedule like what the Eagles have in 2025, every little bit helps. The Birds have a hard road ahead, but it’s good that the road isn’t that long.