The Indianapolis Colts announced on May 14 several key details about their upcoming 2026 regular season schedule, including the decision not to take a bye week after their Week 4 game in London against the Washington Commanders.
Teams often opt for a bye week following games played overseas due to travel demands, but the Colts have chosen otherwise this year. In previous international appearances in Berlin (2025) and Frankfurt (2023), the team scheduled their byes immediately after those games. However, both of those matches were held later in the season and involved longer travel distances than London. Since the NFL expanded its schedule to 17 games in 2021, only 11 out of 27 teams playing in Britain or Ireland have taken a post-London bye, with teams that did not doing reasonably well upon return.
The team’s divisional matchups are more evenly distributed throughout the season compared to prior years. Three AFC South games will occur before midseason and three afterward, breaking from recent patterns where most divisional contests were concentrated early on. The organization noted that it remains uncertain whether this change will be beneficial but emphasized that there will be no extended stretches focused solely on division rivals as seen previously.
A long-standing trend continues as Indianapolis will again not finish its season against the Tennessee Titans—a matchup last seen as a finale in Nashville during 2018 and at home in Lucas Oil Stadium back in 2015. Conversely, another streak ends: for the first time since 2019, they will not face that year’s number one overall draft pick or any of the top three selections from April’s NFL Draft.
Looking ahead at opponents’ records from last year, only six of seventeen scheduled games are against playoff teams from last season—though early matchups include high-profile quarterbacks such as Lamar Jackson and Patrick Mahomes. The organization cautioned fans about making assumptions regarding schedule difficulty based solely on prior performance: “Chances are, a team you may think is good now will be struggling by the time the Colts play them… So let’s wait for this whole thing to play out before we determine if the Colts’ schedule is a meat grinder or a cakewalk.”
