The Chicago Bears’ 2025 schedule has a very intriguing component: A Week 5 bye, which is the earliest slot this year.

The Bears will share their bye week with the NFC North rival Green Bay Packers, as well as the Pittsburgh Steelers and Atlanta Falcons. It’s Chicago’s earliest break since the 2018 season, when they also had a Week 5 bye.

There are many burning questions about how the NFL resolves its massive scheduling puzzle, and league VP of broadcast planning Mike North joined Marquee Sports Network’s “The Chicago Football Show” to answer them — in particular, the bye-week issue.

“I don’t want to say it’s random, but there is some randomness to it, quite honestly,” North said of what the league takes into consideration when setting bye weeks. “Sometimes (the byes) cover stadium blocks, whether it’s the Chicago Marathon or something else like that.”

Because the Chicago Marathon’s start and finish lines are located near Soldier Field, the Bears don’t play at home on that given Sunday. North also said byes can accommodate cross-country road trips.

“They move around to cover tough travel,” North told Scott Bair, Carmen Vitali and Mike Norman. “If an East Coast team has to go to the West Coast for a night game and they’re not getting home until 5 o’clock in the morning on Tuesday, that’s a good time for the bye week to fall.”

In the Bears’ case this year, it could have something to do with not having that early bye in a while, North said.

“There’s a couple things you have to think about. When was the last time the Bears had the earliest possible bye?” North said. “Because they got a Week 5 bye this year, they didn’t have that last year.”

The Bears’ 2024 bye fell on Week 7. They had a particularly late stretch from 2019 to 2022, in which their byes were in Weeks 11, 12, 13 and 11, respectively.

“Now, we’ve got this notion of a bye that’s maybe too late,” North said. “You wait all the way to Week 14 — that’s an awful lot of football before you get your rest period.”

The latest byes this season were handed to the New York Giants, New England Patriots, Carolina Panthers and San Francisco 49ers. North said, however, there is no intent to give a team an early bye.

“If it does (fall on Week 5), they’ve probably paid their dues for a couple years now,” he said.

Still, Bears first-year head coach Ben Johnson said on FS1’s “The Herd” that he’s happy with the scheduling choices this season.

“It usually takes about four weeks into the season to find out who you are as a team, what you do well, what you don’t do well,” Johnson said. “That’s a good time so we can reflect on that as a coaching staff so we can hone in on what we want to be for the remaining three-quarters of the season.”