This is always one of my favorite pieces to write, in large part because of how excited the subject is to talk about his work.
Mike North, the NFL’s vice president of broadcast planning and scheduling, is one of those people who is doing the exact job he was meant to do on this earth, in my opinion. On Wednesday afternoon, we had our annual half-hour phone conversation ahead of the schedule release, and this guy already knows the schedule front to back.
The league went through thousands of iterations of the schedule, per usual, and landed on the version that was just released at 8 p.m. ET less than 36 hours ago.
“Frankly, Jonathan, I wish they’d give us another month,” North laughs. “I wish we could just keep grinding, just keep searching. I know everybody’s got to start making plans and booking flights and hotels and buying tickets, but there’s always hope, there’s always a possibility that maybe there’s something that we could do just a little bit better.
“And we were pretty locked in on our most of our tent poles certainly by Friday before we went home from Mother’s Day weekend, but worked through the weekend, computers kept running, kicked out another 300 to 400 schedules and tried to give all of them a fair shake before the commissioner finally approved the final schedule on Tuesday morning.”
Below is our Q&A, edited for brevity and clarity, on everything schedule-related. At the bottom there are a few interesting bullet-point notes added. We’ll let Mike take it from here.
2025 NFL schedule release: CBS Sports reveals Cowboys vs. Chiefs Thanksgiving showdown
Cody Benjamin
I remember a few years ago we talked about the Lions being the team you all at the league were sort of banking on is like, ‘OK, we’re betting on this team making a run.’ And then last year after what the Texans did in C.J. Stroud’s rookie year, it was the Texans. Who is the ‘it’ team this year?
“I’ll tell you, I think the team that we’re probably looking at that kind of need them to take that next step is probably Washington. You’re going to see a lot of prime-time appearances for them, some 4:25 doubleheader windows. We’ve already announced their games in Madrid (vs. Dolphins), on Christmas (vs. Cowboys), on Fox Saturday Week 16 (vs. Eagles). And then their Sunday, Monday and Thursday night football games. That’s a fan base that maybe has been lying dormant for a while and hopefully with the quarterback and last year’s record and the run to the NFC Championship game, they can build on that success.”
Were there any challenges in making this schedule that were unique to this year? And what I mean by that is there are always challenges in making a schedule I’m very aware of, right? Requests from teams, broadcast partner requests, concerts scheduled at the venue, events taking place in the host city. But anything particularly unique that maybe you all have not come across before?
“This might be a little inside the inside football, but you as a, I don’t want to say scheduling nerd, but as somebody who understands our process, the 272 games this year were stellar. It just worked out with the rotation, the standings, the depth of our 272 this year, honestly, might be more than I ever remember in my 30 years with the league and 27 doing the schedule.
What it gave us was an opportunity to go a little bit bigger in some windows where traditionally we have not. You think about games like Kickoff, Thanksgiving, Christmas, those games probably have a floor, and I don’t think we ever want to really test the floor.
So we go with the Dallas-Philly this year. Maybe we haven’t seen the maximum out of the two Dallas-Philly games for the last couple of years. We actually ended up flexing out at one of them last year. We do very well on Thanksgiving. Now you look at a day that has Green Bay-Detroit, followed by Kansas City-Dallas, followed by Cincinnati-Baltimore, and that still leaves room for a Bears-Eagles game on Black Friday. That’s probably bigger than we normally would’ve done in those four games. And then you roll forward to Christmas and we’ve got three pretty good divisional games all kind of right in a row. Dallas-Washington, Detroit-Minnesota, Denver-Kansas City. I’m not sure we’ve ever really been that strong in those sort of holiday windows before.”
Mike this story is embargoed until tonight but there’s a little rumor floating around that the Jets and Steelers are playing Week 1. Does the league know something about Aaron Rodgers‘ future plans?
“You’ll see Pittsburgh at the Jets are on CBS at 1 o’clock in the afternoon in Week 1 along with seven other NFL games all at the same time. I think if the league knew, we probably would’ve scheduled that game for a national television window. So at worst, it’s Justin Fields against his old team. At best, it’s Aaron Rodgers going up against one of his old teams. Look at what we did with Aaron Rodgers’ first game the last two years (both Monday night games). If we knew something, I think you would’ve seen it reflected in the schedule. That being said, still a good game.”
So … uhhh … Mike. How’d the Chiefs and Cowboys end up on Thanksgiving on CBS?
“It really started with taking a snapshot of the 272. Do we have the depth to go a little bit bigger on a holiday window where normally we wouldn’t use our very best necessarily? And it was really (NFL EVP) Hans Schroeder that challenged the team to say if we were ever going to do it, wouldn’t this be the year to take the Ferrari out of the garage?
The commissioner obviously was excited. He knows what we’ve become as part of the fabric of this country on that day. And you get a lot of casual fans watching Thanksgiving. You know, when you’re starting to do 40-45 million viewers for an NFL game, those maybe aren’t the diehards all season long watching every game no matter what.
I think it became an opportunity that once we realized we think we can do this, we think we can still feed all the other mouths we have to feed, even by putting out a really good spread on Thanksgiving. It became something everybody got excited for. It really started with Hans, partnership with CBS Sports president and CEO David Berson and then obviously approval from the boss.”
And I know we at CBS have taken such pride in being able to be the home of so many epic Bills-Chiefs games in recent years. I know one a lot of places had to want. Will that game be back on CBS this year?
“We honestly talked about that game in a lot of different homes this year. This particular year, Bills-Chiefs did once again land on CBS on Sunday, Nov. 2, in Week 9. There were a lot of looks at a lot of other places for it. You might remember the years of Brady-Manning and that Colts-Patriots game really used to ping pong back and forth between CBS and Sunday afternoon at NBC. You know we like to talk about every game being a free agent, so every game could go to any one of our partners. We absolutely looked at Buffalo-Kansas City on Sunday night, on Monday night, on Fox, and the schedule would’ve been great no matter where it landed. Obviously, it’s one of the things that CBS really likes to hang their hat on. You remember last year taking The NFL Today up there to Buffalo. It is really, really important to CBS. They know it’s not their birthright. They know they’re not going to get it every year, but sure enough, they did land with the regular-season game again this year.”
Well we are grateful for that and looking forward to another epic meeting between the two. One last question. The Titans got Cam Ward and the Jaguars got Travis Hunter. What are you all doing with those teams? And if it should be two separate questions, please answer separately.
“I’ll start with Tennessee. We kind of have this adage that you play your way into prime time. You don’t draft your way into prime time. So the Titans are one of the teams that don’t currently have a national television window assigned. But that’s what things like flexible scheduling are for. And if you look down the stretch for the Titans, they play San Francisco in Week 15, Kansas City in Week 16. They’ve got the same opportunity every other team has to play their way into a national window.”
Got it.
“Now I’ll answer the Jaguars question. It really wasn’t that long ago they were playoff relevant and winning division titles. So we don’t feel like the Jaguars took that much of a massive step backward this year. We had the Kansas City at Jacksonville game earmarked for ESPN “Monday Night Football” kind of early in the season. It ended up in Week 5. And I’ll tell you that after they moved up and drafted the Heisman Trophy winner, I think we only obviously felt even a little bit better about that game. So I wouldn’t say we necessarily suddenly moved that game into a national window, but felt a little better about it once they drafted the Heisman Trophy winner.”
Notes
- The Packers haven’t opened at home since 2018 when they played the Bears in Week 1. Most teams like opening and closing at home while getting a bye week in the middle of the season. Well, we don’t always get what we want. But months after hosting the draft, Green Bay will get to host a season opener for the first time in seven years when they get the Lions.
- Speaking of the Packers, they may potentially get to welcome back Aaron Rodgers in Week 8 on “Sunday Night Football.” The NFL has the Steelers traveling to Lambeau Field on what could be Rodgers’ return to his old home. Even if there is no Rodgers, it’s still a massive game between two of the league’s top franchises.
- The NFL is clearly getting more comfortable with more teams playing on multiple short weeks. Nineteen teams will have more than one short week this year. That’s up from 14 last year and eight in 2023. A big reason for that is, with the addition of the Black Friday and Christmas Day games, there are simply more teams and more opportunities to have multiple short weeks these days versus previous years.
- Along with the Titans, the New Orleans Saints are the only other team that is not currently slated in a national TV window.
- As noted above, teams will blackout dates where their home venue is in use for concerts. That happened with several teams last year when Taylor Swift had the joint booked for the Eras Tour. The league did work around the schedules for Billy Joel, Paul McCartney and Green Day this year, but nothing out of the ordinary.
- Teams who play international games are not guaranteed bye weeks upon their return back to the states. The Vikings got one after their Eurotrip to Dublin and London, and I noted on CBS Sports HQ this week that they may have done a very wise international parlay. The Browns and Jets won’t have their byes upon their return from London, and the Falcons will be playing the week they get back from Berlin.
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