NFL exec: Steelers not playing AFC North game until Week 11 'wasn't intentional'

NFL exec Mike North likens the 2024 slate of Pittsburgh Steelers games to an NCAA basketball schedule. Minus the creampuffs and cupcakes in the early stages, of course.

The Steelers don’t face an AFC North opponent until Week 11, then play six divisional games among their final eight of the season.

It’s a scheduling quirk that hasn’t taken place for the Steelers since the 1970 merger.

“We didn’t set out to not have any division games (early) like a college basketball schedule with the non-division games first,” North, the league’s vice president of broadcast planning, said Thursday in a media conference call. “It wasn’t intentional, but it also was not necessarily something we looked at and thought was unfair.”

The Steelers are not alone in having a backloaded amount of divisional games. The Chicago Bears also don’t face their first NFC North opponent until Week 11. And, like the Steelers, the Bears will play a pair of games down the stretch on short rest.

For the Steelers, they face the Cleveland Browns and Kansas City Chiefs just four days after facing the Baltimore Rivals, their biggest division rival. The game at Cleveland takes place Thursday, Nov. 21. Four days after facing the Ravens in Baltimore in December, the Steelers play the Kansas City Chiefs on Christmas at Acrisure Stadium.

The Bears have two Sunday-Thursday matchups in the second half of the season.

North doesn’t think the Steelers will be at a competitive disadvantage by playing two games on short rest after facing the Ravens.

“You talk about the physicality of divisional games,” he said. “I’m not sure any NFL game isn’t a physical contest.”

North said the NFL tried to uphold its tradition of playing as many intra-division games late in the season as possible. Since 2010, each team has faced a division opponent in the final week of the season, which was Week 17 until the NFL expanded to an 18-week season three years ago.

“It’s always something we’re looking for — maybe even rooting for a little bit,” he said. “We’re not forcing it in other than Week 18. More division games late in the season usually means fewer teams have clinched playoff spots. … Certainly, we didn’t set out to have the Steelers and Bears not playing any division games (earlier). It’s something we’ll take a look at as we move forward, but not necessarily as a disqualifier.”

The NFL relied on 4,000 cloud-based computers to spit out thousands of schedules over the past few months. The one that commissioner Roger Goodell approved was produced at 4 a.m. Sunday morning, about two days after league officials thought they had a previous version ready to be presented.

“We know we’re never going to make everyone happy,” North said.

The biggest game on the Steelers’ schedule — the Christmas matchup against the Chiefs — was determined earlier in the process. The Ravens and Houston Texans will play in the second half of the holiday doubleheader.

“We had to pick the right four teams,” North said. “We had to pick the four teams that played each other, that everybody had one home and one away and were four teams that we felt could hold down four national television windows in December.”

Four days earlier, the Steelers play at Baltimore, and the Chiefs host Houston in two nationally televised Saturday games.

“Had to be four teams that were all playoff relevant, were all healthy and could hold four national windows like that by the time we get there in seven months,” he said.

Both Christmas games will be televised by Netflix. That streaming service was added to the broadcast mix because, according to Jeff Miller, the league’s VP of communications, Netflix has 270 million subscribers worldwide.

And it is because of that global audience that the Steelers and Chiefs will kick off at 1 p.m. Unlike the past two years, when the NFL conducted a Christmas tripleheader, there is no prime-time game Dec. 25.

Hans Schroeder, the NFL’s executive vice president of media distribution, said 3 p.m. and 6:30 p.m. kickoffs were considered. Those are the times the conference championship games are played.

“We got feedback from the markets even before we got to the Netflix deal and the global (reach),” Schroeder said. “At 8 p.m., you get into dinner, travel and other things. While it was great last year in prime time, we just thought that layering of the Netflix deal with its global-first mentality, having that 1 p.m. time would be the right window for us for our fans everywhere.”

The Steelers will play four games in prime time this season. One game that was not scheduled for a night-time slot was the Week 2 matchup at Denver, which involves the return of former Broncos quarterback Russell Wilson. The 4:25 p.m. kickoff Sept. 15 is Denver’s home opener and will be televised by CBS.

In 2022, the NFL scheduled Wilson’s return to Seattle for the opening Monday night of the season, and that homecoming generated 19.8 million viewers, a then-record for a Week 1 “Monday Night Football” game.

“We still think it’s a great story and a great opportunity for a partner to make a fun storyline with a lot of interest,” Schroeder said. “If it hits the schedule right, we love it, but we don’t try to force it in and try to solve for it.”