Normally, the hay would be in the barn for NFL’s broadcast brain trust by the time the draft rolled around—and there was some comfort in knowing that they’d done the best they could, regardless of what that April weekend might bring. Then, last year, thanks in large part to the pandemic, the timeline got pushed back into May. It worked out for everyone, and now looks like the change will be permanent.
That really is the full background on what was a brief nightmare for Howard Katz, Onnie Bose, Mike North, Charlotte Carey, Blake Jones and Nick Cooney just a couple weeks ago.
With some of that team on the ground at the draft in Cleveland, the Aaron Rodgers news cycle powder keg that had been simmering the whole offseason combusted. First, it was a trade offer the Niners made. Then, it was Rodgers’s level of content. And by that afternoon, there were legitimate questions around the quarterback’s future in Green Bay—his future there—circulating.
At that point, the NFL people assigned to the schedule had been working on it for nearly four months, and the finish line was clearly in sight. And with the Packers looming large in the process, set to play on big stages and in prominent broadcast windows, they suddenly had to reckon with the idea of Jordan Love, rather than Rodgers, being on national TV.
“Right up until last season, we put the schedule out before the draft. And that was kind of a firm thing,” said Bose, the NFL’s VP of broadcasting. “So in some ways, it gave us an opportunity to react and think through. Look, I will tell you that just given some of the comments and the signals Aaron’s given over the last few months, it, at least, had entered our mind to consider what it would mean if that were the case. So we weren’t caught flat-footed.
“But at the same time, those [reports], it certainly made us think very heavily. We were in Cleveland, the scheduling team, we were all on site for the draft, but we were on the Zooms with Howard Katz Thursday, Friday, really thinking through. And what does that mean? How do we react to this?”
Thankfully, for the sake of the sanity of the half dozen schedule-makers, Rodgers remains a Packer now, with the schedule out.
But the whole circumstance really illuminated the challenges for Bose, Katz, North and their team. On one hand, thanks to even more possible game combinations, with the schedule going from 17 weeks to 18, and 256 games to 272, and some shifts in broadcast rights, the group had more flexibility than ever before. On another, in part because of circumstances like Rodgers’s, this year was more complicated than any other.
And the result of all of it was what you saw released on Wednesday night. A day later, we’ll tell you how they got there.
