The NFL announced on Tuesday a new 17-game schedule has been announced for the 2021 season. This comes as no surprise, of course.
Instead of four preseason games and 16 regular-season games, there will now be three preseason contests and 17 games in the regular season.
This, naturally, will create a schedule imbalance for teams. They will either get nine home games to go with their eight road games or have eight home contests with nine games on the road.
For the Arizona Cardinals, they will have an extra road game in 2021.
Their extra game is against the Cleveland Browns.
They are already scheduled to play six games against their own division, one game each against the NFC North and AFC South, and then one game against the Carolina Panthers and Dallas Cowboys, each of whom finished in third place in their respective divisions. The Cardinals finished in third place in the NFC West last season.
In this new 17-game format, the NFC West will face one team in the AFC North. Arizona will travel to Cleveland to face the Browns, who went 11-5 last season, which earned them a trip to the postseason even though they were in third place in their division. They won their wild-card game against the Pittsburgh Steelers and were eliminated in the divisional round when they lost to the Kansas City Chiefs.
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