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2024 NFL Schedule: Why the NFL Is All-In on Aaron Rodgers and the Jets
From the 2024 NFL schedule release comes story lines, and there’s no bigger one in the NFL this year than Aaron Rodgers and the New York Jets. And the league is leaning into that one—again—even after paying for it last year in a very, very big way.
Only three teams maxed out with six prime-time games—the San Francisco 49ers, Dallas Cowboys and the Jets, who had a similarly unforgiving prime-time schedule last year.
And only two teams have seven stand-alone games—the Kansas City Chiefs and the Jets.
In that group of four, you have last year’s two Super Bowl teams, one of the world’s strongest professional sports brands … and the Jets, a franchise that has the longest playoff drought (13 seasons) in the NFL by a margin of five years over the other 31 teams. It’s also a team leaning heavily on a 40-year-old quarterback coming off a torn Achilles, with the NFL similarly leaning on Aaron Rodgers’s ability to stay healthy in keeping the Jets atop the marquee.
Fingers crossed.
And I could feel that sentiment talking to NFL vice president of broadcasting Onnie Bose late Wednesday night, less than an hour after the league took the wrapper off the 2024 schedule for everyone to see. He compared the dynamic to trying to schedule the Denver Broncos in ’12, with Peyton Manning returning from four neck surgeries that led to his release from the Indianapolis Colts. That one worked out, of course. Denver finished 13–3 before being upset by the Baltimore Ravens in double overtime in the AFC divisional round playoffs. He can only hope this game ends like that one did.
“We went all-in on the Jets last year with Aaron Rodgers, starting with that [Monday night] game, and it happens four whole plays into it,” Bose says. “They were playing the Chiefs early on and the Eagles. They had great matchups. The reality is we built a lot of our schedule around that premise that everybody gets a shot at Aaron Rodgers and the Jets. It’s the New York market. If they are a successful team, given that drought, it would be such a great story. And it kind of fell apart. On the other hand, despite that, viewership was up.
“The Jets are still a solid team at their core. We talked a lot about that. How do we go into it this year? He is coming off a big injury, but at the same time it’s still Aaron Rodgers. It’s still the New York market. They still play in the AFC East. They still play the 49ers and Houston and a bunch of big games.”
The answer, quite simply, was to go all-in again, with flex scheduling giving the league a bit of an escape hatch. The Jets’ six prime-time games all fall in the first 11 weeks of the season, including a stretch where they’ll play three in 18 days, with a 1 p.m. ET visit to the archrival New England Patriots, too. And then there’s a twist that some would consider a little cruel—just like last year, they’ll open on Monday Night Football.
So if Rodgers's story line is burning in early September, that element is like throwing a can of lighter fluid on the fire. Which, in the end, the league won’t shy away from.
“A year ago, we quickly got to Buffalo at the Jets, Week 1, Monday Night Football—let’s go, Rodgers’s first game,” Bose says. “This was not the same case. It was absolutely on our radar, a lot of different variations, probably across all the windows of Week 1. We started to see this come into shape. It’s a massive game. The reaction when ESPN announced that the other day was huge. It’s big. It’s Aaron going back to the area where he grew up. You always want to get off to a strong start. There are great games across Week 1. This was one of them.
“It was not a, Let’s definitely do this. But as we saw schedules, we really liked that start. It’s enthusiastic for ESPN and everyone else. It’s a little bit that comes full circle from last year.”
So, buckle up, Jets. The hype and hysteria surrounding the team last year may have died down over the past eight months, but the league is betting—in a Jerry Jones sort of way—on it coming right back around.
And with that in my mind, here are some takeaways from my conversation with Bose …
It is, indeed, becoming more challenging to protect Sunday afternoon games. What’s been the bread and butter of the NFL for generations—the slew of 1 p.m., 4 p.m. and 4:25 p.m. (roughly) kickoffs—has come under siege by a financially driven cannibalism in recent years. Quite simply, the league can’t give to midweek windows, holiday games and international time zones without taking from the core element of its schedule.
I was curious about what’s governing it. Certainly, CBS and Fox are protecting their interests. And Bose credited the league’s director of broadcasting, Charlotte Carey, for being the in-house protector of Sunday afternoons, as the inventory that fills them gets picked away.
“She is really the wizard of Sunday afternoons,” Bose says. “She looks at these schedules, and she’ll tell us, ‘We can’t do this. We can’t play this week for CBS. We can’t play this week for Fox.’ She has a vision for how these map out. Obviously, the home market, you’re going to want to watch your home team. If you’re a Philadelphia Eagles fan and the Eagles are playing on Thursday night, you still want an attractive game on TV on Sunday afternoon.
“We spent a lot of time on that.”
That said, the NFL built itself flexibility in the newest set of broadcast deals. One of my biggest questions going into the call with Bose was how the league could keep doing this—taking games away from CBS and Fox—and essentially putting them back on the market like they did with the Christmas doubleheader sold to Netflix.
The answer from Bose is that a certain margin (he wouldn’t give specifics on the number) is baked into the contracts allowing for the NFL to do it.
“As part of those deals, there are minimum requirements,” Bose says. “We know that Fox has to get a minimum number of Cowboys games, CBS has to get a minimum number of Chiefs games, and the rest of the AFC and NFC, respectively. Beyond that, there’s a minimum in the total number of games that they have to get. As long as we meet that minimum, we have that opportunity. There’s some margin in there. The margin is what gave us the opportunity to figure out how to do Christmas this year."
I did ask Bose whether they’re close to their limits with the contracts and he answered, “There’s a point where we’ll have to figure out how to make sure we hit those targets, but so far we’ve had the ability to do that.”
But Christmas, of course, wasn’t just about selling the package this year, but also about figuring out how to play on a Wednesday. And Bose and his team tried to get ahead of that challenge, even after NFL EVP of media distribution Hans Schroeder told The Wall Street Journal in December that the league wouldn’t play on the holiday this year because of where it landed on the calendar.
His reasoning was logical: The three Christmas games in 2023 averaged 28 million viewers.
“It was always a possibility. It’s definitely proving to be a major day for us,” Bose says. “Wednesday was a challenge. I don’t think we went into the early part of the schedule process thinking definitively we’re going to do this. We absolutely thought about, If we’re going to do this, what’s it going to take to do it?”
There was no perfect solution, so what Bose calls the Christmas round-robin was birthed, with the Houston Texans at the Chiefs, and the Pittsburgh Steelers at the Ravens on the Saturday of Week 16, then the Chiefs at the Steelers and the Ravens at the Texans on Christmas, with each team getting one home game, one away game, and a Sunday–Saturday–Wednesday turn, which prevents playing on three days rest, but creates consecutive short weeks.
It also means Baltimore and Kansas City will play on Christmas for a second consecutive year, with the Ravens on the road on the holiday (and in a different time zone) again.
“We’re evolving into a place where we play on Christmas. We play on Thanksgiving. We play internationally,” Bose says. “We’re mindful and we certainly engage with our clubs, but we’re more and more in a world where these are the windows where we’re going to play. They’re high-profile windows. The Chiefs and Ravens aren’t going to be surprised by that.”
I felt the accompanying question here, then, would be when enough becomes enough. It’s one that’s often asked, of course. This year, 14 teams are playing multiple games with turnarounds of five days or fewer (which doesn’t even count coming off MNF games as short weeks). The Chiefs Sunday–Saturday–Wednesday stretch in Weeks 15, 16 and 17 is preceded by a Sunday–Friday turn in Weeks 12 and 13 to get Kansas City on Black Friday. The 49ers will play twice on Thursday night, once in December before finishing the season on a short week.
It’s tough on everyone, especially the teams the NFL sees as most appealing.
“That [question] probably lies elsewhere in our organization,” Bose says, respectfully. “We always engage with football ops and make sure that we are engaged, have their awareness. … We’ve learned a lot. We’ve learned that teams, if you have this schedule in advance, you can prepare for it, you can manage to it.”
The good news is that the number of teams with appeal helps, as does an added piece of flexibility in the broadcast deals. Bose made that second part easy to understand—where all of the different windows and partners have made this exercise more complex, the chance to move NFC games to CBS, and AFC games to Fox, has eased the burden. It used to be grinding through different permutations, but not anymore.
“We’d narrow down and say, We like what this schedule represents, let’s keep 80% or more of what we like about it, and that’s how we got to our final schedule,” Bose says. “Unlike other years, we had a lot of flexibility. We had a lot of great choices. Right down to the last several days, it was, We would love to just tweak this one little thing that in any other year we may have just played, and found that we were able to continue to improve it."
And, again, while teams such as the Patriots, Carolina Panthers, Colts and Broncos have fallen off the front page, others have made the leap. Last year, the NFL made a bet that paid off that the Detroit Lions would be such a team. This year, they’ve similar bets on the Texans (four prime-time games, six stand-alone games) and Chicago Bears (three prime-time games, five stand-alone games), who have exciting young quarterbacks piloting ascending rosters.
And now, we can get to the caveat everyone’s been talking about on those stand-alone games, which is that you better have your credit card information ready if you want all of them. No fewer than four streaming services—Amazon Prime, Netflix, ESPN+ and Peacock—have exclusive broadcasts this year. The company line on that has long been the NFL is going where the younger audience is.
While there’s truth to that, the real motive here, clearly, is financial. That said, Bose did want to emphasize that he and his group try their best to be mindful of an older audience that is less apt to adapt to a changing world or may feel like it’s being forgotten.
“It’s a very fair question,” Bose says. “It’s more of a rollout question. A bedrock for us is, even if the game’s on ESPN or on NFL Network, it’s always going to be on over the air in the home market. That hasn’t changed. I don’t expect that to change at any point. That’s an important part of our strategy. We really try to push to educate fans. We said after Year 1 with Amazon, All right, good start, but part of it is making sure that we continue to educate how to find those games on Prime Video on Thursday night.
“There was a massive push that you clearly saw last year from Week 18 to wild-card [weekend] with that game being on Peacock. Hitting 22 million on that game said something to us. We’re aware of it. We’re mindful of it. I go back to the preponderance of our games that are still on over-the-air television."
And with all of that ground covered, I did want to ask whether the Taylor Swift tour would impact anything. Bose laughed and said, off memory, that Swift’s dates in New Orleans, Indianapolis and Miami were taken into account, but no more so than any other set of concerts in the past.
Swift does happen to be in Toronto the weekend the Chiefs play 90 minutes away in Buffalo, but Bose swore, when I followed up via text, that wasn’t intentional.
“Definitely not,” he wrote. “Not even on my radar and I’m guessing not on the radar of our team (although we have several Swifties in the broadcast department).”
They, of course, had a lot of other things to worry about before Bose, fellow VP of broadcasting Mike North, Carey, senior director of broadcasting Blake Jones, and broadcasting senior coordinator Lucy Popko handed Commissioner Roger Goodell their work Monday morning with all 272 games.
And as such, it belongs to the rest of us, and that crew is ready for all of your commentary and complaints, Jets fans included.
