Whether through New Year’s resolutions or a fresh perspective on long-standing traditions, everyone is searching for change.
It’s that time of the year.
We already saw Joel Klatt voice that Army-Navy should be moved to Week 0. And that idea seemed better in his head than in actuality. Meanwhile, Mike Tirico has his own proposal for the NFL — and from a scheduling standpoint, it makes a lot more sense than Klatt’s suggestion.
While their proposals are hardly in the same breath — merely a coincidence that two of football’s top announcers are calling for major scheduling shifts — Tirico’s suggestion during a recent SI Media with Jimmy Traina podcast seems much more practical.
“I would love if the league could find a way to pivot, so Thanksgiving on, the last five weeks of the season, was scheduled like the Premier League, where we know the matchups, but we have no designation, and maybe Nov. 1 you start designating some of the windows — like the Thursday’s,” Tirico told Traina.
“Thursday, you have to do all the way out — I understand that. But you start designating the Monday windows and the Sunday windows, and as we get closer, you do like we just saw this week for Week 17 where we say, ‘OK, there’s a pool of games here, three of them will be on NFL Network on Saturday, one and the other two will be slotted in somewhere.’
“I just think teams flip so quick from really good team to bad team or an injury changes a team. It would be best, not just for the network partners, which is our concern, but it would be best for the fans because you get the best games in those standalone windows.
“We don’t mind and understand you’re gonna get some games at 1 or 4 o’clock that are not the best games, but in the 4:25 window, the Sunday night window, the Monday night window, if you get a dog, if you get a bad game, it’s not good for the momentum of the season. So, I really wish that they could come about and do something to make that real.”
Traina agreed, calling it one of the best ideas he’s heard. He added that it’s frustrating when networks get stuck with a poorly timed game that fails to live up to the hype, and he noted that flexibility would alleviate some of that pressure.
“That’s why it would really benefit everybody to just kind of put placeholders in,” Tirico explained. “You’re going to play Week 16, we’re going to figure it out — and Thursdays you have to schedule out a little bit there because of rest. So, I’ll take the Thursdays out of the mix… We slid a game from a Sunday to a Monday last year; games slide around in the Sunday slot. I’m very sensitive to the fans — you want to give them a little lead time — so, you have three, four weeks to plan early game, late game or night game.
“Because I’ve seen that first-hand where it’s disruptive as time changes on a game. But I think it would be the easiest thing to do in a league that’s less predictable than ever when you’re sitting around, doing the schedule in March and April… This could just be a way to make it a tweak better.”
[SI Media with Jimmy Traina]
