Aaron Rodgers' arrival to Jets helped schedule-makers plan accordingly
New York Jets' quarterback Aaron Rodgers talks to reporters after an NFL football press conference at the Jets' training facility in Florham Park, N.J., Wednesday, April 26, 2023. (AP Photo/Seth Wenig) Credit: Seth Wenig
The Jets weren’t the only team waiting anxiously through the interminable five week dark period of little to no movement to see whether they could eventually finalize a trade with the Packers and land Aaron Rodgers as their quarterback.
At the NFL offices another crew was monitoring that progress very closely as well. They were the folks who put together the league’s schedule and a big element in mapping out the season would be whether or not the future Hall of Famer would be moving to the nation’s biggest market.
Unlike the Jets, by late last month this team was almost about to give up.
“There was definitely a plan in place that we had all talked about where if these things didn’t get done by the draft… maybe we should hedge a little bit, maybe not quite so many Jets games in primetime,” said Mike North, the league’s vice president for broadcast planning.
Of course, the deal was finalized in the days prior to the draft and when the schedule was released this week it had Rodgers and the Jets playing in six primetime slots including Monday night of opening week and the NFL’s first Black Friday game.
“If Aaron Rodgers doesn’t get the deal done and they don’t agree to the trade, then maybe on May 1 we kind of peel back on some of those and run it again, run it again, run it again,” North said of using the software to create new schedules based on current events. “We were lucky that those planes landed prior to the draft and we were able to lock in on a path we had already gone through, but we’re nimble enough and flexible enough now to be able to reset and restart really on a moment’s notice. We were prepared for that. But I’m glad it went down the way it did.”
There was a time not very long ago that the NFL would not have been able to react to events such as the Rodgers trade or Lamar Jackson resigning with the Ravens as easily as it did. First of all, until recently the schedule was released in early April a few weeks prior to the draft. Had that been the current case there is no way the Jets would have gotten those six primetime slots.
Going back even further, the league used to assemble the schedule by hand, hanging planks on a huge board to map out their season. Working in that mode, the ripple effects of big changes would have been too overwhelming to even contemplate.
Now, though, the schedule is released in early May, after the draft and after the frenzied period when many big-time trades go down.
“That time element has been really helpful for us,” said Hans Schroeder, executive vice president and chief operating officer of NFL Media. “Pushing the schedule release back later gives us more flexibility.”
They also use powerful computers that can crunch an almost incomprehensible number of schedule permutations and spit out the ones that appear to be the most logical for human review and hands-on decision making.
“The truth is we could kind of start over every day, and to a certain extent we do because every time you hit the button the computers go all the way back to square one and they start searching through an infinite space,” North said. “Aaron Rodgers is going to be a Jet? Great. Let’s lock a couple of the Jets games into primetime, let’s allow a few more to be doubleheaders, hey let’s even consider them for Black Friday and run it again.”
Rodgers isn’t the first big name quarterback to switch teams in the offseason and impact the scheduling process. North said the first one he recalls doing that was the Easter Sunday trade of Donovan McNabb from Philadelphia to Washington in 2010. That required some “patchwork” on an almost finished schedule, North said.
Soon such changes became almost annual events.
There was Peyton Manning’s free agency tour when the quarterback was released by the Colts in 2012.
“We were working on schedules while watching on NFL Network as his private jet landed in Miami, in San Francisco, in Nashville, in Denver, and thinking about how we would change our process,” North said.
And of course there have been several Tom Brady blockbusters that have shaken things up in the scheduling department. In March of 2020 he signed with the Bucs. “All systems stopped and we re-evaluated all of the Tampa Bay games,” North said. In February of 2022 Brady announced his retirement and the league took that into consideration as it began working on the 2023 schedule. Then, 40 days later, he unretired. The Tampa Bay games were re-re-evaluated.
Not all of those big quarterback changes work, of course, for the teams or the schedule cobblers. Last year after Russell Wilson was traded from Seattle to Denver the league did to the Broncos what it has done to the Jets this season and thrust them to the front of the line for the premier windows. The Broncos wound up having an awful season, many of their prime time appearances were lopsided contests, and by the end of the year they were being flexed out of those slots.
“We definitely had that conversation, I’ll be honest with you,” North said regarding their decision to be all-in on the Jets after whiffing on the Broncos a year ago.
In at least one of the six nationally-televised stand-alone Jets games, though, it wasn’t so much the league that wanted them there. When the NFL agreed to the debut of a Black Friday game it was Amazon, which will broadcast the game, who pushed for a New York team.
“Amazon did reach out to us and suggested that maybe since they are the retail leader in this space and New York is the biggest market and the number one retail market in the country, maybe a game in New York might be a fun way to introduce this concept,” North said.
Other options, he said, were a Giants-Eagles game (a matchup that eventually landed as part of a Christmas Day triple-header), a Bengals home game in which the team not only volunteered for the opportunity but suggested Black Friday games in Cincinnati become an annual tradition the way Thanksgiving Day games in Detroit and Dallas are, and Kansas City playing the Raiders in Las Vegas (i.e. Black Friday at the Black Hole).
Ultimately it was the Jets and Dolphins who were put in that Black Friday spot. North said it was because it was a division game, but, let’s face it, the Jets are playing then for the same reason they are playing all of their other spotlight contests.
It’s because they got Aaron Rodgers.
And it’s because they got Aaron Rodgers in time for the schedule to reflect them getting Aaron Rodgers.
“You play your way into prime time, you play your way into bigger windows,” North said.
The Jets, a team that hasn’t reached the postseason in a league-high 12 seasons, that is coming off a 7-10 record in which they lost their last six games and didn’t score a touchdown in their last three, certainly haven’t done that, exactly.
They traded their way there.
In 2023, in front of more people than have ever watched before, we’ll find out if it was worth it, both for the Jets and the NFL’s schedule architects.
They are, after all, now the two linked teams that can either win big or lose terribly from this endeavor.
Tom Rock began covering sports for Newsday in 1996 and became its NFL columnist in 2022. He previously was Newsday's Giants beat writer beginning in 2008.
