Kansas City Chiefs and Patrick Mahomes are must-see programming for TV executives
Like an artist touching up a painting again and again, the NFL spent an enormous amount of time trying to find the perfect 2021 schedule.
Howard Katz, the NFL’s senior vice president of broadcasting, revealed the number of attempts it took before the league was satisfied with the 2021 schedule during an interview Monday with Christopher “Mad Dog” Russo on Russo’s SiriusXM show.
The total: 102,844.
So, yeah, a lot of work went into finding the right day, time and network for all 272 games.
“I really liked the way the games are sequenced,” Katz said. “We spent a lot of time on the minutiae. And I think it paid off.”
One big factor is the networks want marquee players and teams, and the Chiefs and Patrick Mahomes were in high demand.
In a news release announcing CBS Sports’ coverage plans for the 2021 season, the network highlighted five of the noon starts, and just one team was mentioned twice: the Chiefs. It was their games on Oct. 3 (at Philadelphia) and Oct. 24 (at Tennessee).
While noting the big 3:25 p.m. national games, two teams showed up on the CBS list three times: the Chiefs and Steelers.
In an interview with the Sports Business Journal, CBS Sports chairman Sean McManus said having AFC games is a boon for his network because of the quarterbacks.
“The AFC is the home of most of the young and exciting quarterbacks in the league — Patrick Mahomes, Lamar Jackson, Baker Mayfield, Josh Allen, Tua Tagovailoa — and now we’ve got Trevor Lawrence and Zach Wilson,” McManus said. “That gives us a great base.”
CBS also hoped to broadcast the Chiefs-Packers game, which at this time features Mahomes play against Aaron Rodgers. Then again, so did ESPN, NBC, Amazon and Fox, which ended up getting it.
“I think there are a lot of great games this year. Green Bay-Kansas City is a game everybody wanted,” Katz said. “There are a lot of games and I think we did a reasonably good job of spreading them around to all of our broadcast partners.”
In his weekly column, NBC Sports’ Peter King said early versions of the schedule had the game as a late Christmas present for NFL fans.
“For a while in the scheduling process, this game was nestled as a Fox doubleheader game on Christmas weekend (Sunday, Dec. 26),” King wrote. “But Katz thought it was too late. What if either team had clinched a playoff spot and might not play its full team for the full game? What if either team was out of contention by then? So it got moved to Week 9, the Fox doubleheader game on Nov. 7.”
In the Sirius interview, Katz offered some other insights into how the NFL schedule came together, including that ESPN circled the Chiefs-Giants game on “Monday Night Football” after the network got its schedule from the league. Here are a few other interesting nuggets.
The 17th game
Katz said the NFL’s decision to have AFC teams play host to NFC teams this year was a matter of fairness.
“We didn’t think it was fair if two teams are vying for a wildcard spot in the same conference, and some of them have the extra home game and some didn’t,” Katz said. “So we wanted all the extra home games to be either in the AFC or the NFC. We decided we’re going to be in the AFC this year.We thought that was a fair thing to do. The second thing we had to do, which was a little tricky, as you well know, the visiting team basically determines whether the game is a CBS or Fox game, right? So if the Jets are at an NFC team, it’s an AFC game and if the Giants are (in New York) against an AFC team, it’s an NFC Fox game.
“Well, we didn’t want all 16 extra games to go to either CBS or Fox. So we had to get CBS and Fox to recognize the same thing to agree that all 16 of those games would essentially be free agents, they could go into either package. So once we got through the mechanics of trying to figure out exactly how we were scheduling the extra week, and taught the computer what to do with the extra week, then we saw the benefit of having those 16 ‘free-agent games.’ that we could spread around and use to help balance out packages, because there really were some very, very attractive games in those 17th game for all these teams.”
Emergency flex scheduling
Fans know all about the flex scheduling, which can move an important afternoon game to “Sunday Night Football.” That doesn’t happen early in the season, and Katz said the flex scheduling will begin in Week 11 this fall.
But he also revealed the NFL has an option early in the season.
“We have this kind of what we call emergency flex though in weeks five to 10,” Katz said. “If a quarterback goes down, a team just totally falls apart, we have the ability to flex out of games twice on Sunday night if we need to. We haven’t used that in a while. But that was used ... one year when Peyton Manning got hurt in Indy and we were on a Sunday night game in New Orleans, and I didn’t realize that Peyton played offense and defense but their whole team fell apart. So we have a mechanism to fix that.”
Week 18 Saturday games
There are two games scheduled to be played on a Saturday in the final week of the regular season, and Katz said those matchups might not be known until after the Monday night game in Week 17.
“We are hoping to find two games where a team needs to win to stay alive and is scoreboard watching on Sunday,” Katz said. “So we don’t want to play games on Saturday that will render games on Sunday meaningless. I mean a team may need to win on Saturday against the division opponent just to stay alive to see what happens on Sunday.
“So we’ve never done it before. We’ll see what happens. Those teams might or might not get an extra day (off) going into the Wild Card weekend.”
