Packers–Bears: How the NFL Schedules Its Oldest Rivalry

Since 2002, 41.7% of Packers–Bears meetings have been played in primetime — the second-highest rate of any divisional rivalry in football, and more than double the 20.3% divisional average. But in 24 seasons, the NFL has never once put both of their annual meetings in primetime. Exactly one, almost every year.

Every schedule maker has a handful of games they know they can sell before they've placed a single other matchup. Packers–Bears is one of them — the league's oldest rivalry, first played in 1921, still running twice a year. The interesting question is how carefully they use it.

The numbers, first

A note on scope: this rivalry predates our data. The tables below cover the Super Bowl era — 1966 through 2025 — which is 118 of the roughly 200 games these two have played. Primetime-specific figures start in 2002, when the current divisional format began and kickoff-time data becomes reliable.

	1966–2001	2002–2025
Meetings	70	48
Green Bay wins	39	35
Chicago wins	31	13
Monday night games	6	5
Total primetime	—	20
Primetime share	8.6% (Monday only)	41.7%

Across the full Super Bowl era: 118 meetings, Green Bay 74, Chicago 44.

The two columns are two different eras. There were night games between 1966 and 2001 — six Monday nighters, all after MNF launched in 1970, and Monday is the only night window the older data reliably tracks. But the primetime slots really started filling for these two in 2002: since then, four out of every ten meetings have been at night.

Second only to Dallas–Philadelphia

Rank every divisional rivalry by the share of its meetings played in primetime since 2002, and the top of the list looks like this:

Rivalry	Meetings	Primetime	Share
Cowboys–Eagles	48	22	45.8%
Packers–Bears	48	20	41.7%
Cowboys–Giants	48	19	39.6%
Packers–Vikings	48	17	35.4%
Ravens–Steelers	48	16	33.3%
Broncos–Chiefs	48	15	31.3%
49ers–Seahawks	48	15	31.3%

Every divisional pairing plays exactly 48 times over 24 seasons — home and away, every year, no exceptions. So this is a clean comparison: same denominator, same opportunities.

The league-wide number for divisional games is 20.3%. Packers–Bears gets roughly double the primetime exposure of a typical division game. Chicago is a top-three media market, so some of that is expected — the remarkable half of the equation is Green Bay, the smallest market in the league, drawing marquee windows year after year anyway.

Three rivalries, three different jobs

Share alone hides something, though — and if your instinct was that Cowboys–Giants is the primetime rivalry, you're right about a real thing. It just depends which night you mean.

	Sunday	Monday	Thursday	Kickoff	Other*	Total
Cowboys–Eagles	15	4	0	1	2	22
Packers–Bears	9	5	3	1	2	20
Cowboys–Giants	13	5	1	0	0	19
Bears–Vikings	4	10	0	0	0	14

*Night games outside the four weekly windows: for Packers–Bears, the 2015 Thanksgiving night game and a 2025 Saturday-night game; for Cowboys–Eagles, Saturday-night games in 2002 and 2021.

Cowboys–Giants is a Sunday night rivalry. Thirteen of its nineteen primetime games are in that one window — second-most in football behind Cowboys–Eagles. Two enormous media markets, the league's marquee weekly showcase, over and over.

Packers–Bears is a whatever-window-you-need rivalry. It's the only pairing among the four to appear in all four night slots — Sunday, Monday, Thursday, and a Week 1 Kickoff game. Nine Sunday nights isn't a leading total; it's tied fourth. What gets this rivalry to second overall is that it works everywhere.

And Bears–Vikings is a Monday night rivalry, full stop. Ten Monday night games since 2002 — the most of any pairing in the NFL — against just four Sunday nights and zero Thursdays. It ranks tenth in total primetime while leading the league outright in the oldest primetime window there is. It's also getting more pronounced, not less: four of those ten Mondays have come in the last six seasons, including each of the last three.

Note which franchise appears twice. Chicago is the flexible partner in one rivalry and the Monday night fixture in another — a team the league reaches for constantly, in different ways, depending on what it needs to fill.

Never both

Here's the finding that surprised us.

In 24 seasons, Packers–Bears has produced 20 primetime games. In not one of those seasons were both meetings in primetime.

That hasn't been always true of some other big rivalries. Cowboys–Eagles has doubled up. So have Cowboys–Giants, Ravens–Steelers, and Broncos–Chiefs. 49ers–Seahawks has done it twice.

Rivalry	Primetime games	Seasons with both meetings in primetime
Cowboys–Eagles	22	1
Packers–Bears	20	0
Cowboys–Giants	19	1
Ravens–Steelers	16	1
49ers–Seahawks	15	2

Twenty primetime games, zero doubles. The most-used rivalry in football that has never once been used twice in a season.

Read that as a scheduling philosophy and it makes sense: one of these is a national event, two is inventory management. The league takes the meeting it wants — and leaves the other on Sunday afternoon, where it belongs to the division race rather than to the broadcast.

There's a streak inside this, too. From 2006 through 2022 — seventeen consecutive seasons — Packers–Bears was scheduled in primetime at least once. Only four seasons since 2002 have gone dark entirely: 2004, 2005, 2023, and 2024.

Where in the calendar it lands

The other habit shows up in the week numbers. Since 2002:

• Week 1: six times — the third-most-common Week 1 divisional matchup in football, behind only Cowboys–Giants (8) and tied with Bills–Jets (6)
• Weeks 16 and 17: five times each
• Weeks 14 and 15: four times each
• Weeks 17 or 18 combined: seven times

Openers and finales. The league puts this game where the season starts or where it ends, and comparatively rarely in the anonymous middle — Week 6, Week 7, and Week 9 have hosted one meeting apiece in 24 years.

The clearest single example: the 2019 season opener. The NFL's 100th season began with Green Bay at Chicago on a Thursday night at Soldier Field — the league marking its own centennial by handing the first game to the two franchises that have been playing each other since 1921. Green Bay won 10–3, which was an ugly game and entirely beside the point.

The holidays

Three holiday meetings since 2002, all in Green Bay:

• Christmas 2005 — Bears 24, Packers 17
• Christmas 2011 — Packers 35, Bears 21
• Thanksgiving 2015 — Bears 17, Packers 13, as the league's third Thanksgiving game

That last one is worth pausing on. Detroit and Dallas host the first two Thanksgiving windows every year without fail, which means the third game is the only Thanksgiving slot the NFL can actually give away. In 2015 they gave it to this.

And there's a related quirk in the broader data: since 2002, Green Bay and Chicago have each made seven road trips on Thanksgiving — more than any other franchise. Washington is next with six. The two teams the NFL most often ships out on the holiday are the two teams in its oldest rivalry, which is either a coincidence or a fairly clear statement about which visitors move the needle.

What it means if you're building a schedule

If you're constructing a mock 2027 season, the Packers–Bears rule set is now fairly well defined by six decades of precedent:

1. Give one meeting a night window, not two. Twenty primetime games and zero doubles is not a small sample.
2. Favor the edges of the calendar. Week 1 or the closing stretch, not Week 7.
3. Expect it in Week 1 more than any other single week. Six openers in 24 years.
4. Don't assume it's dark just because it was last year. Four blank seasons out of 24, but also a seventeen-year streak.

Those are exactly the kinds of constraints real schedule makers work under — not rules written down anywhere, but patterns strong enough that breaking them looks wrong. Our mock schedule builder enforces the structural rules of the NFL calendar so you can test your own version against them, and when the real schedule drops in May you can see how close you got.

The Bears and Packers will play twice in 2027, as they have every year since the merger. One of those games will almost certainly be at night. The other almost certainly won't.

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Game data from MockSlate's NFL slot history dataset, built from nflverse/nfldata (2002–2025) and FiveThirtyEight's historical NFL game file (1966–2001).

MockSlate is an independent fan tool and is not affiliated with, sponsored by, or endorsed by the National Football League or any NFL team. Team names are used for identification purposes only.