Increasingly, the NFL schedule release is evidence that the league itself knows what you like. And with each year, the folks in charge are going to be guessing less and less.
On Thursday, through my half-hour conversation with NFL VP of broadcast planning Mike North and VP of broadcasting Onnie Bose, that much became increasingly clear in how they talked about their audience, how they broke down their partners and how they reach their conclusion in solving a giant Rubik’s Cube with 272 little boxes on its sides.
North used to be one of the guys pulling tags off a giant board—in what surely was a smoke-filled Manhattan conference room—to try to arrange a schedule that made sense for the league, its teams and its broadcast partners. Decades later, much of that guesswork has been replaced.
Indeed, what you’ll see when the final schedule is revealed Thursday at 8 p.m. ET was worked through computers, and—as seemingly everything is in sports now—complex analytical studies built to, in Bose’s phrasing, flip the mix of art and science that goes into the scheduling process. The league has its computers and its own in-house analytics team helping. It also has Amazon Web Services and Recentive Analytics out of Boston pitching in to make sure it is looking around absolutely every corner.
Here’s a little more from my conversation with Bose and North on what is a fascinating process every year, what they worked through with a crew that included longtime broadcasting czar Howard Katz, as well as Charlotte Carey, Blake Jones and Lucy Popko.
Mark J. Rebilas/USA TODAY Sports (Mahomes); Kirthmon F. Dozier/USA TODAY Network (Goff)
A lot of factors went into picking the Lions against the Chiefs in the Week 1 season opener. All of them bring to life the competing interests at play. One interesting one was whether to put a premier AFC opponent, such as the Bills or Bengals, in that slot. Those ideas were considered, as was putting Philly there for a Super Bowl rematch. But, ultimately, those “assets” were seen as too valuable elsewhere, especially since the opener will rate well regardless.
“Cincinnati or Buffalo obviously would’ve been great,” North says. “You gotta figure those are three of the best teams in that conference right now, so it stands to reason that they’re gonna be playing for something down the stretch. So, those games are gonna be relevant. Not that they wouldn’t be in Week 1, but they’ll only get more interesting the later you wait to deploy them. I hope we didn’t wait too long—Buffalo-K.C. is in December; Cincinnati-K.C. is on New Year’s Eve. But if you had to guess who’s gonna be playing for something in Week 17, I think Bengals-Chiefs is a safe bet.”
Conversely, while all of those would bring a lot of pop as familiar, playoff rematches, putting the Lions there presented the league with a chance to put a new, exciting, entertaining team on a bigger stage—and see where Detroit takes the opportunity.
“That’s 100% right,” Bose says. “We all got introduced to Detroit a little bit last summer during Hard Knocks. We know they play on Thanksgiving, and that game most years is our second- or third-most-watched game of the season. Fans have definitely seen the Lions, but it’s kinda always been in that one window. By moving them to Game 272 last year and seeing them go into Lambeau and knock off [Aaron] Rodgers and the Packers, I think people are really interested to see them this year.”
The biggest challenge this year also became a way the process was smoothed out. In some ways, removing the conference affiliations from CBS and Fox this year (both will still get a minimum number of games for their assigned conferences and, of course, the conference playoffs) did create new hurdles. But in other ways, it actually helped.
“[In the past] if we decided to put [an NFC or AFC] game into prime time on Sunday or Monday night, we were literally taking that game away from CBS and Fox. We literally had the term takeaways in ownership resolutions and network television deals,” North says. “That’s gone now. So every game is a jump ball; every game is a toss-up. So the opportunity to move these games into different windows without having to worry about, Oh, are we taking this away from somebody?, almost exponentially increased the solution space.
“It took us a little longer in our search time every night, as the computer spun through the universe of schedules,” North says. The computer spit out more 112,000 completed schedules this year, and the NFL deemed approximately 450 of them worthy of doing a deep dive into.
“It took a little longer to find schedules, but the ones we were finding were better and also very different. So as it came down to the end, and we were comparing the final two, three, four schedules, normally by this point in the process, they all look the same. … But as we got to the very end, the finalists, the contender schedules, were very, very different. Different kickoff game. Different Thanksgiving games. Different Christmas games.”
The NFL has the five broadcast partners rank their top 50 games every year, and this year a lot of the same games came up and a lot of the same teams were listed. Which, to me, is a way of illustrating just who the button pushers in television feel resonates with you, the viewers.
“You won’t be surprised by it at all. Most of that top 20 is going to be Cowboys and Chiefs games; they’re kind of in their own echelon in terms of viewership, purely just on history of the Cowboys and the appeal of the Super Bowl champs with Patrick Mahomes,” Bose says. “That’s Tier 1. But then you’ve got a great tier of competitive teams that are in that mix to win their conference and go to the Super Bowl, across Philadelphia, Buffalo, Cincinnati, San Francisco, and those teams all play each other quite a bit.
“You’ve seen it in the mix of those games, as we’ve been putting out the breadcrumbs, a bunch of those games are the ones we’re teasing because those are the ones people are circling.”
Tom Horak/USA TODAY Sports
The uncertainty surrounding Rodgers did create consternation. The schedule makers are, of course, more conditioned to these sorts of things now, with Tom Brady, Matthew Stafford, Russell Wilson, Deshaun Watson, Matt Ryan and Carson Wentz, among others, having changed teams over the past three years alone. But until the deals are done, it’s hard to count on anything, so while the Rodgers negotiation dragged into late April, the schedulers had to be ready for anything.
“It goes back to Peyton Manning. When he was on his free-agent tour in 2012, we were very much on multiple paths, and our technology and our process was not nearly as flexible and efficient as it is now,” Bose says. “Even Aaron last year, Is he going back to the Packers? Tom Brady, retiring, unretiring. We’ve got some experience, and we’ve learned that we can be patient and see how things play out. This year, obviously, there was a lot of momentum to the Jets, so we were already thinking about that. It certainly helped when he went on [The Pat] McAfee [Show] and said I intend to play for the Jets, that allowed us to focus on that. …
“Then when it got to the week of the draft, we then had to say to ourselves, Hey, it makes all the sense in the world for this trade to happen before the draft, so the Packers have draft capital, but let’s be prepared if he’s not traded by Friday night of the draft, Saturday morning, Sunday morning. Let’s be ready to talk about contingency. And, fortunately, that trade went down on the Monday prior, and we were confident and it was set.”
Bose said it’s “fair” to say the Jets’ Week 1 game became a hot commodity for the networks right then and there, and the decision to put that one on Monday Night Football was made, at least in part, to make sure the whole country gets to see it.
While we’re there, yes, it was weird for everyone that Brady, for the first time in more than two decades, didn’t factor into the equation. And, yes, there was a material effect to that.
“It’s big,” Bose says. “I’ve been doing this 15, 16, 17 years, and for a huge stretch of that we had this stability of Hall of Fame–level quarterbacks who played for the same team for 10-plus years across two Mannings, a Brady, a [Ben] Roethlisberger, a [Drew] Brees, just to start. Let alone [Philip] Rivers [and] Matt Ryan. It’s a new paradigm here. Tom Brady, obviously, the greatest of all time and was reliable on the Patriots and the Buccaneers, you could put him into any window against almost any team and carry an audience. Not having that in the mix was meaningful.
“All of a sudden, you have to find different games to populate those windows. Obviously, Aaron Rodgers is gonna get that kind of attention. Patrick Mahomes is that one, but beyond that, you’re talking about teams that are up and coming but they’re not guaranteed to be immediate draws. It did shift how we had to think about things. We’re fortunate there are a lot of young stars and a lot of good emerging rivalries, and we were able to put those into big windows.
“But not having Tom Brady, and we certainly went through the exercise of having to contemplate it for about 40 days last year when he was retired, just changes how you look at the overall mix. And we talk about overall shift, with Tom Brady and Aaron Rodgers no longer in the NFC, it’s a very different dynamic.”
And, finally, there was one problem that was, and will continue to be, more difficult to solve—maintaining the allure of Sunday afternoon. With all the new prime-time and holiday windows, North referenced Katz’s constant reminder that the NFL now has “a lot more mouths to feed” with its inventory. And, simply, the fact is that for every great prime-time or holiday game the NFL has, that’s one fewer of those matchups for 1 p.m. or 4:25 p.m. ET Sunday.
”What’s new this year?” North says. “The Black Friday game on Amazon, so that brings us up to 16 games in that package. Remember, last year we did the side-by-side MNF games in Week 2, one on ESPN, one on ABC; this year, there’s three of those [and] two additional Monday night games to deploy. We’ve got an eighth NFL Network game, so they’re playing four of the 9:30 [a.m. ET] Europe games. They’ve got a tripleheader on Saturday of Week 15 and the Sunday night of Week 16, because NBC moved off Sunday night (Christmas Eve), they moved to Saturday afternoon of Week 16 to lead into another new window for us, which is the Peacock game. So Peacock’s gonna have an exclusive game this year; that’s going to be the Buffalo Bills and the Los Angeles Chargers.
“The pressure on Sunday afternoon has only increased. It’s still trying to thread that needle and find the right balance between putting the biggest games in our biggest windows, which is for the most part in prime time and the Sunday afternoon doubleheader slot, knowing you can’t take all the good stuff away from Sunday afternoon at 1 o’clock. That’s still where 15, 20 million of our fans are watching football.”
Was the NFL able to pull that off? North and Bose know that’s up to you.
The goal, in the end, is to give you what you want as much as possible, which will give the league what it wants—the maximum number of eyeballs on those 272 regular-season games.
“Our fans are telling us every day what’s important to them,” North said hours ahead of the schedule release. “Every time they hit a link, every time they download a video, every time they read an article on NFL.com, every time they turn on the television and watch NFL Total Access, every time they add a player to their fantasy team, every time they buy a hat or a T-shirt, every time they buy a ticket on the secondary market, every time they place a legal bet, our fans are telling us every day what’s important to them, what they’re interested in.
“So how do we take all those data sets and combine them into providing a definitive value of each one of these 272 assets, and then deploy them accordingly across 18 weeks and to all our media partners, so everyone feels like they got a fair shake?”
Of course, not everyone will feel that way at 8 p.m.
Every year’s schedule gives birth to its share of victims, and you’ll surely hear them loudly, on social media and elsewhere, over the next couple of days. North knows that’s part of the territory, and that’s why they keep chipping away at making the process better.
But they’ve come a long, long way, to the point where the league can now, through its own analytics and these outside services, say fairly accurately, “Each of these games has a value, a predicted viewership number,” North says. Which, as you might imagine, really, helps put the full slate together.
“We’re getting there,” North says. “I’m not sure it’s all the way there yet. It’s a little easier to do on a Sunday night or a Monday night, where we got decades worth of Nielsen viewership history. It’s a little tougher on a Sunday afternoon, because you don’t know if you’ve got four or five games in the 1 o’clock window, where Fox is gonna air the Minnesota-Cincinnati game. Are they gonna put it into Des Moines, Iowa, put it into Sacramento, California? Is it gonna air in Miami, Florida? Well, it depends. What are the other games in that window?
“So trying to figure out which of these games are gonna be distributed in which market, and then how many viewers they’re going to deliver is maybe still a little bit of a bridge too far. But that’s the goal. That’s the direction, if you can accurately predict the viewership of every game, in each and every window, in each of every week of the season.”
Which is to say, the numbers say you’re liking what the league is putting together more each year—even if you don’t necessarily feel that in your gut on this particular Thursday night.
