Chicago Bears to open NFL Season on Thursday night vs Green Bay Packers
The Chicago Bears will be kicking off the NFL’s 100th season at home with a game against the Green Bay Packers.
If I would have told you that the Chicago Bears would be hosting the NFL’s Thursday night season opener game in 2019, you would have been doing back flips because the logical assumption would be that the Bears won the Super Bowl.
Well, unfortunately for the Bears, that dream didn’t quite come to fruition.
The NFL announced today that even though the Chicago Bears didn’t win the Super Bowl, they still would be kicking off the NFL’s 100th season.
The opening game of the 2019 season will be #Packers at #Bears, per NFL Media Executive VP and COO Hans Schroeder. Meanwhile, the #Patriots will host the Sunday night opening game. A slight change for the Super Bowl champs.
— Ian Rapoport (@RapSheet) March 25, 2019
The NFL is going to pull out all the stops for their 100th season. They made that clear during the Super Bowl when they launched their highly successful NFL 100 commercial with all the greats from past and present.
The NFL had an easy match-up to feature in week one for the NFL’s 100th season, the Green Bay Packers and Bears was an obvious choice.
The issue with said choice is that the Bears and Packers played week one on Sunday Night Football last year to celebrate the Packers 100th season (their first season in existence was prior to the NFL’s birth).
NBC wasn’t going to want the exact same Sunday night match-up in week one, but swapping the Bears to Thursday night and the New England Patriots to Sunday night still gives NBC the Super Bowl champs to kick off Sunday Night Football and allows NBC to package a Packers- Bears match-up on Thursday night in a fresh manner rather than just re-upping the same Sunday night week one matchup two years in a row.
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The NFL is going to try several different avenues to make fun creative matchups and creative locations for their 100th season. Don’t be shocked if the NFL even tries to put a regular season game in Canton this year. Canton was the birth of the NFL on September 17th, 1920.
Monday Night Football this year is September 16th. Would it make sense to have the Arizona Cardinals, the NFL’s other charter franchise that’s still in existence, play in Canton on that day? The NFL has been working with teams to try to see if a team is willing to give up a home game to play in Canton.
The NFL should be releasing their full schedule in three to four weeks. So far we know the Bears will be opening the season at home against the Packers on Thursday night and they will be playing the Oakland Raiders in London in mid to late October and their bye week should be following that game.