It sounds like Joe Burrow has NFL commissioner Roger Goodell’s ear on more than flag football.
Mike North, the NFL scheduling guru who must somehow marry data with drama before honeymooning them into 32 teams and 18 weeks, noted Burrow’s reaction when the Bengals didn’t head international last year and indicated their well-traveled quarterback might be pleased with this year’s schedule.
“He’s been vocal about it. I remember he was pretty disappointed last year when you guys didn’t go,” North told Bengals.com this week. “I think that’s a real possibility for the Bengals this year.
“Certainly, they’re a candidate to go play Washington in London, certainly a candidate to go play Atlanta in Madrid. They’ve got one of those fan bases, thanks in large part to the quarterback, that resonates in Europe and across the planet.”
But as North took a break from the NFL’s annual league meeting on an Arizona Biltmore patio, he stressed that nothing is set until the conference room doors are shut in New York when the full NFL schedule is unleashed in the next five to six weeks.
The computers are still chewing numbers. North figures the sked is half done. For instance, Netflix is currently negotiating with the NFL about adding a Thanksgiving Eve game and an international game to its Christmas slate.
Burrow’s swashbuckling offense of Ja’Marr Chase, Tee Higgins, and Chase Brown that always seems to put on a prime-time show remains a big data point. (Burrow’s three double-digit comebacks against the Chiefs, Chase’s club-record 16 catches against Pittsburgh, Higgins’ third touchdown catch a walkoff against Denver.)
North, the NFL’s vice president for broadcast planning, got into the holiday mood when he attended last season’s Thanksgiving night game in Baltimore (Chase Brown’s 113 scrimmage yards) and noted the electricity.
“You never know which domino has to tip over in order to solve some other problem somewhere. We’ve got a lot of mouths to feed,” North said. “Let’s see what happens with this other package that’s being bid on now.
“We want to continue the momentum of things like Thanksgiving and Christmas. You saw we mentioned Thanksgiving Eve. We’re playing on Christmas Eve, late-season Saturdays. There are an awful lot of windows where we want to make sure we’ve got really good games. But I would say that the international games are in that bucket.”
The bad news is that North saw the Bengals conquer the Ravens’ run of nine straight Thursday night wins at home to go along with the excitement of Burrow’s return from a Turf toe injury and a 32-14 win as robust as the viewership nearing 30 million.
The good news is that North knows he can’t send the Bengals back into Baltimore for a fifth straight year for a Thursday night Prime Video game.
“It’s probably time. It’s probably time,” North said. “It’s a fair question, and we don’t know how it’s going to go this year yet, but we are certainly aware of the recent history, and if we’re doing our jobs, we’re trying to avoid the same things over and over again. Competitive inequities or travel considerations or fan unfriendliness, so I would be shocked beyond belief if we had another Bengals at Ravens on a short week this year. That would be very surprising.”
What won’t be surprising is that the Bengals get their share of nightly bows.
“We’ve had really good success with the Bengals in recent years,” North said. “And even if you go back a few years, I remember we saved a Kansas City-Cincinnati game for a CBS doubleheader (in 2023) and Joe got hurt, and he wasn’t there, but the team showed up, and they played hard, and it was still meaningful, and it still hit a really good viewership number.
“Knowing Cincy plays KC again, knowing you have all those AFC North games, there’s a lot of really good ones. Not at all expecting the Bengals to have mostly Sunday one o’clock. There are plenty of prime-time games for them.”
Bengals-Chiefs has become a 4:25 p.m. staple when it’s not an AFC title game, and they meet again this year at Paycor Stadium. The big question is Patrick Mahomes’ return from an ACL injury, but it certainly sounds like the NFL is expecting a sixth Burrow-Mahomes heavyweight bout. Four have been decided on the last play, and the fifth was a three-point win for Cincinnati at Paycor.
“My honest assessment, sitting here today, is we’re going to be ready to go week one. I don’t know if (the Chiefs) are going to play Seattle on kickoff Wednesday, but I would expect us to have the Chiefs well represented in national windows,” said North, who thinks those will come early in the season as well as late.
“It’s one of those games at the top of everybody’s list. CBS feels like it should always be a 4:25 doubleheader game on their air. NBC would love it. ESPN would love it. Amazon would love it. Fox would love a shot at a Big Kansas City-Cincy game. So that’s one of those games that everybody kind of wants, and so you got to be real strategic about doling out those really, really top-end games.”
What Burrow’s Bengals did in Baltimore emboldened the NFL’s foray into the holidays.
“It was a great show on Thanksgiving,” North said. “I think it proved to all of us that we haven’t always put our best foot forward, maybe on Thanksgiving night on NBC, but I think we’ve shown that with the right game, you can continue delivering really good viewership on that night.”
It can all be quite dizzying. It’s amazing that they’re even halfway through. North was quoted at the meetings by other NFL officials as saying, “Let the computer make us smart.”
But you don’t need algorithm to know the Bengals get eyes. North says the Bengals’ draw, such as their high ratings on Thanksgiving, heighten their international profile. The NFL also uses recency for the overseas matchups, and the Bengals haven’t been since the year before they drafted Burrow in 2019 and played the Rams in London.
“Using a Bengals game in that manner might almost be more effective than using them on a Sunday night or a Monday night or a Thursday night domestically,” said North, still crunching numbers Bengals fans’ hope spit out No. 9.