A last place schedule could go a long way in the 49ers getting back to the postseason.
The NFL will release its schedule on May 14. The San Francisco 49ers hope to win the rest advantage after getting hosed in 2024 when they were at a significant disadvantage after facing four teams coming off a bye week.
According to Warren Sharp, the 49ers have the easiest strength of schedule for 2025:
What NFL team has the easiest schedule in 2025:
Based on projected win totals, the San Francisco 49ers have the easiest strength of schedule for the 2025 NFL season.
NFL teams with the easiest schedules in 2025:
San Francisco 49ers
The 49ers’ projected win total is 10.5. Using Vegas win totals is one of the better ways to predict the strength of the schedule, especially when compared to using metrics like the previous season’s record.
Statistical analysis supports this: from 2010 to 2018, only 5.7% of a team’s actual SOS was explained by opponents’ prior-year records, and this correlation dropped to just 3.9% in more recent years.
Strength of schedule calculations based on prior season records do not effectively predict future team success.
For instance, regression analysis showed that only 0.028% of a team’s wins could be explained by the traditional SOS metric, with a p-value of 0.79, indicating no statistically significant relationship.
This underscores the inadequacy of using past records to forecast future outcomes.
For example, the Browns, Giants, Titans, Falcons, Colts, and Seahawks (x2) are all on the 49ers schedule next season. Each team is projected to win fewer than seven games next year. Most of the teams we just listed are among the lowest, if not the lowest, projected win total teams in 2025.
Here’s more from Sharp as to why we should be referencing win totals as opposed to previous season records:
Projected win totals incorporate current information about team strength, including offseason acquisitions, injuries, and coaching changes.
These projections are crafted by sportsbooks aiming to predict future performance, making them more reflective of a team’s current capabilities.
While no SOS metric is perfect, using Vegas win totals provides a better indication of what teams could look like in the upcoming season than relying on the previous year’s wins.
We know that certain teams will benefit from luck factors in games next season, such as fumble recoveries, opponent field goal misses, tipped passes which result in interceptions, and red zone variance.
But with current projected win totals, the pure luck factors that decide games are not incorporated.
It’s also important to note how different a team’s strength of schedule is versus the previous year. For reference, the 49ers had the 28th-most difficult schedule heading into the 2024 season. The NFC West had the three most difficult schedules. No team saw a bigger improvement in the forecasted strength of schedule than the 49ers.