NFL News NFL News, Reports and Updates
Greg Auman
NFC South Reporter
The NFL rolled out its 272-game masterpiece Wednesday night in unveiling the league’s 2024 schedule, eagerly anticipated by fans and the final result of millions of permutations crunched by supercomputers to satisfy billion-dollar TV partners, maximize national audiences and make 32 teams feel like they got a fair shake.
League officials called the process “an incredibly challenging puzzle” and likened it to finding “the best grain of sand on the beach,” with nearly endless options complicated by the league now playing games on almost every day of the week.
“We keep taking needles out, and the haystack is essentially infinite,” said Mike North, the NFL’s vice president of broadcast planning, on a conference call with reporters on Thursday.
The morning after, having enjoyed every team’s creative videos laying out their 2024 opponents, we take a closer look at the nuances and difficulties not only in creating the schedule, but for some teams, playing the hand dealt to them.
[2024 NFL schedule release videos: Chargers, Patriots, Cowboys among those going viral]
Every day but Tuesdays now
The NFL used to be a quaint Sunday affair with a single encore on Monday night each week. That expanded to Thursday nights in 2006. Now, the league’s games cover nearly every day of the week. The two-time defending Super Bowl champion Chiefs will play a game on every day of the week except Tuesday this season, including on Christmas Day, which is a Wednesday.
To wedge two Christmas games on Netflix — Chiefs at Steelers and Ravens at Texans — into the regular season, the league had to schedule the same four teams on a Saturday the week before, giving them the same short week that teams have when they play on a Thursday after a Sunday. So on Dec. 21, the Texans are at the Chiefs and the Steelers are at the Ravens, a five-day holiday round-robin of sorts that has each team hosting one game and playing one…
Source link : https://www.foxsports.com/stories/nfl/inside-the-nfl-schedule-puzzle-byes-christmas-overseas-trips-and-taylor-swift
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Publish date : 2024-05-16 18:18:29
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