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Putting the NFL schedule together has always been a months-long slog for the people assigned the task at the league office—a group long led by legendary broadcasting executive Howard Katz. There are powerful networks now investing billions into televising America’s most popular game—and new big-money streamers emerging as partners—to serve, with a finite number of games and teams to offer up to them.
So when the group, now led by the league’s EVP of media distribution Hans Schroeder, walked down the hall to hand Roger Goodell the final product Tuesday afternoon, it was equal parts exhilarating and nerve-racking. It’s not that Goodell wouldn’t sign off. It’s more the amount of work that goes into it every year.
The process starts literally the moment the regular season ends—when the next season’s matchups are locked in, via the scheduling formula—and runs four months, right up to a home stretch that brings a final group into focus.
“Going into the weekend, we’re really into fine-tuning mode,” Schroeder said on Tuesday afternoon. “Over the last week to 10 days or so, we get down to a schedule we start calling our leader, then we start looking at a bunch of additional schedules, comparing them to the leader. And literally, we put them side by side, going window by window, game by game, asking which schedule we think is stronger.
“And … can anyone beat the leader?”
By last week, the schedule-makers had a leader that wouldn’t be beat, and that leader is what you’re looking at now, with the table set for the 2026 NFL season.
Over the years, of course, new challenges in assembling the schedule have arisen.
This year, per Schroeder, three in particular stuck out.
The first was the raw number of international games. The NFL is going to Australia, France and Rio de Janeiro this year, along with the usual spots in London, Munich, Madrid and Mexico City. Each game has its set of challenges. For instance, the game in Melbourne had to be in Week 1 because of the travel demands on the teams to go halfway across the world. That meant bumping the Brazil game, which was held in São Paulo the past two years, out of Week 1.
The second was the new windows that were being negotiated, with the Thanksgiving Eve game standing as the biggest challenge—mostly because that meant putting a game on a Wednesday, and arranging byes to accommodate it. Also, because the first Friday of the season this year fell on the second Friday of September, the Sports Broadcasting Act of 1961 would prevent the NFL from using that date as a window, which it had for the Brazil game the past two years.
The third challenge was less obvious, but also geographic. The two West divisions now have three teams apiece on the league’s marquee, and those two divisions play each other in the scheduling rotation this year. That meant more big games were locked into either the late-afternoon window on Sunday or prime time.
“You look at a Week 4 [game], where you have a Kansas City–Vegas with a Denver–San Francisco and a Chargers-Seattle, all in a doubleheader window on CBS,” said Schroeder. “You look the next week, you have Chicago–Green Bay on Fox in the doubleheader, with Detroit-Arizona and San Francisco–Seattle in it, too. There are just so many great teams in western time zones, there’s a lot of really fun and great games in that four o’clock window.”
So that was the jumping-off point for the half-hour I got with Schroeder.
Here are some other things of note …
• I figured the uncertainty over Aaron Rodgers and Patrick Mahomes’s ACL rehab might affect the way the league scheduled the Steelers and Chiefs. It really didn’t. The Steelers have six stand-alone games, four in prime time, and they’re one of the six teams that can be flexed into Saturday in Week 16. The Chiefs are in prime time six times—their first two games are at night—and they’re one of the teams that can be flexed to Saturday in Week 17.
“Pittsburgh’s a national brand. I don’t remember the last time they had a losing record; it would’ve been more than 20 years ago,” Schroeder said. “They’ve played with different quarterbacks and they’re still really competitive. … Obviously, it’ll be exciting to see what happens with Aaron [Rodgers] as they get that situation resolved one way or another.
“And similar to the Chiefs, the Chiefs are one of the most popular teams in the league; they have a huge following. We certainly are hopeful that Patrick will be back in Week 1. We read the same stories everyone else does, but we think that’s a heck of a coach, a heck of a team. They went out and got Justin Fields, and he’s with Coach [Andy] Reid in case Patrick’s not healthy.”
• Last year, I did this story with VP of broadcasting Onnie Bose, and he emphasized how the league was “going big” by putting the biggest games in the biggest windows, rather using the biggest windows to prop games up—with Dallas playing at the champion Eagles in the opener and the Chiefs visiting Dallas on Thanksgiving as examples.
Same thing this year. Rams-Niners, Patriots-Lions and Ravens-Cowboys are among the matchups they’re sending overseas. They put a Super Bowl rematch in the opener. They stacked Thanksgiving with Rams-Packers the day before to precede a Bears-Lions, Cowboys-Eagles, Chiefs-Bills tripleheader. And Christmas is similarly loaded, with Packers-Bears, Bills-Broncos and Rams-Seahawks on for the holiday.
“It was, What if we put our biggest matchups there? What can happen?” Schroeder said. “We got a little disrupted by the weather in Philly [in the opener last year], but that was pacing for well over 30 million viewers. We got into Thanksgiving and then started with taking our highest ever rating, 42 million going to 47, and then we went all the way to 57 million viewers. … So yeah, we look at the numbers, look at the data, and there’s always a little bit of innovation, and calculated moves we’ll make. And we don’t know it until we do it.
“But all the data we look at, yeah, the short answer is we’re taking an even bigger step forward this year.”
• The flip side of that is that with so many different windows to fill, and big swings to take, the hit has to be felt somewhere—with 272 pieces of real estate to work with, this is all a zero-sum game. The traditional Sunday afternoon windows are generally where the hits are taken. And you can see it this year in Week 16.
The aforementioned Christmas tripleheader is preceded by a TNF Christmas Eve game between Houston and Philly, and will be followed by two Saturday games, with a Monday-nighter to wrap the week. So as it stands now, CBS has just Patriots-Jets and Ravens-Browns in its early window, and Titans-Raiders in the late window; and Fox has only Chargers-Dolphins and Cardinals-Saints in the early window, with a 49ers-Chiefs banger in the late window. Two more games will fall out of the Saturday mix into that group of games, but that’s still really light for a Sunday.
“Yes, we are playing more national windows,” said Schroeder. “But we hope that’s a win-win for our fans. That gives fans more opportunities to see more NFL overall. … You can look at Week 7 this year. It’s a Fox doubleheader, and we have only three games in the early window, but we have Giants-Houston, something we think will play well on the East Coast with Houston in the South. You have Tampa in Carolina, and then you have a West Coast team, San Francisco, in Atlanta. We think we’re filling the map up well.
• There are some interesting quirks here, too, that might not be all that comfortable for teams. The Rams-Packers Thanksgiving Eve game means those teams essentially won’t get a true bye week, since their byes come before their Wednesday game—giving each three mini-byes rather than a true bye and a mini-bye. Also, five teams will play games over Thanksgiving and Christmas (the Bears, Bills, Broncos, Packers and Rams).
But there’s one team in particular that jumped out to me as having a brutally difficult draw, and that’s the Rams. They open in Australia, play on a short week in Weeks 3 and 6, have back-to-back trips to Denver and Philly at the September-October turn, have another East Coast trip (Washington) before Veteran’s Day, then play on a Wednesday and Thursday in back-to-back weeks, followed by a Christmas Friday game and a Saturday flex trip to Tampa in Week 17.
It’s a compliment to their appeal, the same way a similar run last year was for the Chiefs. But clearly, it’s a lot to deal with—and to be clear, the Rams people I asked the past couple days about all this are setting their jaws for it rather than jawing at the league with complaints.
“They were a couple plays away in the divisional game two years ago, they’re down to the wire in the NFC championship game last year, an incredible coach, incredible quarterback in [Matthew] Stafford, Puka [Nacua]—it’s a great team,” Schroeder said. “They played their way, in our mind, into some of these windows. … At the same time, we’ve tried to do a really responsible job, and spent a lot of effort with all our teams, making sure that their schedule is a fair and competitive one. And so we feel really good about that.”
• As for those new windows and the NFL’s international slate, Schroeder did say it would be impossible to navigate all of it without the decision a few years back to make every regular-season game a “free agent,” breaking the traditional conference ties. Another thing that has helped guide decision-making has been the analytics side of it—which shows how teams have played on short weeks or coming off international travel.
I touched base with Mike Lopez at the league office to dive into that, and he gave me some numbers the league has used. One critical statistic was that the 23 teams that have come off international games to play the next week (without a bye) went 13–10, with a plus-2.7 point differential. They also ran numbers that showed rest wasn’t a significant factor, one way or the other, in win percentage or point differential.
• Schroeder did say choosing the Patriots as the Seahawks’ Week 1 opponent was, in part, influenced by the performances of last year’s Super Bowl rematch in Week 2. “Philadelphia–Kansas City, and a Super Bowl that wasn’t that close rated really well,” Schroeder said, “And coming on the heels of that Super Bowl, maybe it’s a little something extra for New England to play for.”
I did ask, for what it’s worth, if the controversy Mike Vrabel has been embroiled in was in any way a factor as the league discussed who to put opposite Seattle. He said it wasn’t.
“No,” he said. “We thought New England vs. Seattle would be a hell of a football game. It’s a rematch of the Super Bowl teams. Our focus was, that’s a great story—a really fun story with the two teams that ended the year last year playing, then opening this year.”
And for what it’s worth, Schroeder said the discussion on placing the opener and the Australia game—with that Friday off the table—was always centered on playing one on a Wednesday and the other on a Thursday. They did debate which should go first, with the tradition of having the champion open the season winning out.
Finally, there was an enormous amount of work that went into this week. The lives of Mike North and Max St. John, who lead the process, become consumed by the schedule from January through the middle of May. Bose, Blake Jones, Josh Helmrich, Lucy Popko, Matt Winston are right there with them, first narrowing hundreds of thousands of possibilities down to 6,000 schedules that are categorized as “playable,” then identifying the best ones, finding a leader, and then, again, trying to beat that leader.
So yes, it was a long road they all had to travel before taking that short walk to Goodell.
“That’s the group,” Schroeder said. “To me, in the breadth of my job and my role, it’s one of the most inspiring things to me, to see the passion and the focus and the dedication of that team. That day after day, for four months, goes in there and looks at the same set of work and the same set of analysis. The effort, it’s certainly the same Day 1 as it is at the end, probably even higher at the end. … It’s a challenge every year, and they do an unbelievable job.”
Now all that work belongs to the world, and to you, the football-rabid consumers who can start planning your fall.
• The number of windows and focus on big games has also opened the door for more teams to max out on prime-time slots. A quarter of the league—eight teams—are in either six or seven stand-alone night games, those being the Cowboys, Eagles, Bears, Packers, Seahawks, Bills, Chiefs and Rams.
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