SI's Albert Breer Dishes on Jets' Primetime Games in 'MMQB Takeaways'

The Week 1 MNF matchup featuring Jets makes sense for ESPN

With the National Football League Spring Meetings still a week away and OTAs not yet at high speed, the 2023 NFL schedule remains a main topic of water-cooler conversation for a little while longer. 

In his "Monday Morning Quarterback Takeaways," Sports Illustrated senior NFL writer Albert Breer provided insight on the schedule-making process and dished on some key elements included in the 2023 regular season 272-game slate.

Breer re-confirmed the obvious notion that Aaron Rodgers' arrival seriously boosted the New York Jets' primetime television appeal and he proceeded to point out another benefit for the networks featuring Gang Green in their most-valuable windows.

From Breer's "MMQB" Takeaways:

• My sense, talking to those guys, was the Monday Night Football window for Aaron Rodgers’s debut as a Jet, at home against Buffalo, was appealing in large part because of the engine that ESPN has to keep the conversation on the game, and Rodgers, going all day long coming out of the first Sunday of games. Five of the Jets’ first 11 games will be stand-alone, national broadcasts, which will satiate the public’s desire to see where that story goes. The Jets then start December with four consecutive 1 p.m. kickoffs, meaning, if they’re as good as some expect, they’ll be a prime flex candidate.

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— Albert Breer (@AlbertBreer) May 15, 2023

Mike North, the NFL VP of Broadcast Planning, admitted that the opportunity for ESPN to build its daily content around the Monday Night Football matchup made Rodgers and the Jets a fruitful choice for the Week 1 spotlight.

"The Jets having Aaron Rodgers now, and, thankfully, that deal got done before our schedule came out. His first game was gonna have a lot of interest, no two ways around it," said North during a May 11 interview on "One Bills Live." "What we got was a Jets-Bills game on Monday night of Week 1 and you kind of let the ESPN promotional machine, you know, starting in the morning with all the talk shows, and then all throughout the day, kinda talking about Aaron Rodgers and his journey to New York."

In Takeaways, Breer dropped a noteworthy nugget on the topic of networks' ability to claim certain games involving certain teams.

"The NFL’s been coy about the minimums. But I can tell you that the minimums are set on a per-team basis—CBS is guaranteed a certain amount of games with each AFC team, and Fox is guaranteed a certain amount of games with each NFC team. And if you want to read the tea leaves here, the Chiefs and Cowboys would be on their own tier as far as desirability to the networks goes, and Kansas City has eight games on CBS, and Dallas has eight games on Fox," wrote Breer.

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