Join us right now on the Rood guest hotline.

Root is the most reliable heating and air congestion products in the DMV. It's Mike North, NFL VP of Broadcast Planning. Thanks for joining us, Mike. Hello, boys. How are you doing today? Well, I was doing a lot better until I saw this schedule, Mike. Uh-oh. What do you got? All right, here's thing. Diehard Skins fan, Commander's fan, whatever. and we knew the opponents

I actually never really care that much about when you debut the schedule because we know the opponents. We are so front-loaded, though, I feel like you couldn't have made it tougher. I don't see a scenario where you could have made it much tougher for us. I don't know. You mean you're looking for that homecoming opponent?

You're looking for that easy win in the first four weeks? There's no cupcakes in this league. Sometimes I feel like there are. Tennessee is kind of a cupcake. Sometimes I feel like there are. I don't know. So do you look at, I don't know if you, obviously you can't memorize everyone's schedule. but if you peruse the commander's schedule,

you don't think that it's kind of a brutal opening eight or nine weeks.

I bet he's schedule. But if you peruse the commander's schedule, you don't think that it's kind of a brutal opening eight or nine weeks.

I bet he's got a lot of them memorized.

Probably dancing around in his head as he speaks.

Let's go through the first seven weeks, all right?

I fully recognize two road division games start the season, tough putt.

But man, you steal one of of those and you know you got that

in your pocket down the stretch Seattle's always tough but a west coast team coming east to play at

one o'clock with that 10 a.m. body clock they always say they hated we'll see and then look you knew you

were going to london that one was coming right so home before London the week after. You do have the long trip to San Fran, but it's on a Monday night and you come back to the buy. So right there through seven weeks, I don't know, you really feel like you're buried. And now you're ready to go. What is it left? Six home, five road. I think everybody in the league would take that down the stretch. Hey, Mike, can I ask you, did the... That's a good spin. I don't know if I'm buying it, but okay. Did the commanders request not to have the week five by week? After the Colts? And they get kicked to the week seven by week after traveling back from England. You know, we've been playing in England now, what, 20 years, I think. In the early days, it was, oh, my God, this is so out of everybody's routine. Of course you have to be home the week before, and of course you have to have the buy the week after. That's not true anymore. These games are becoming routine, I think, particularly for the East Coast teams. You go over there, you play, what, in the the afternoon over there which is the morning over here

they're back in the facility by midnight sunday night that's easier than when you go to san francisco

particularly when we put san francisco on a monday so we're treating these london games a little

bit more routine you're not guaranteed you buy the week after i think the team would have

preferred the buy even a little later maybe but no they didn't ask for the week five buy. But also, they didn't get a choice. If the buy fell there, we'd have played that schedule. Mike, when you guys look at all these, and I assume you look at it and say, okay, is this fair to the teams, right? Like you say, the trap. What are the factors? Because I just look at it, like, how good the team was last year, you know, on the road, that sort of, what things do you look at, though, to determine whether or not a schedule and your estimation is fair or not? Yeah, the whole game here is take these 272 matchups, their assets, but they don't belong to us.

They belong to the fans.

We want to make sure that the very best of these assets are in the very best television windows,

so as many fans as possible can watch the very best game.

So you're looking for maximizing, you know, optimizing distribution of your very best assets, blah, blah, blah. It's television, it's viewership, it's revenue, of course. This is a business. But there's always a line that you shouldn't cross. Competitive unfairness, anything you're doing to a club that says, hey, this really isn't fair. Wherever that line is, I acknowledge, we probably walk right up to it, but I hope we don't cross it. So does somebody have, you know, seven playoff teams in a row? Do they wait to start their division series until week nine? Do they have the earliest possible by, you know, third year in a row? Has it been a while since they opened at home or closed at home? All those things that the clubs aren't shy about reminding us and letting us know, hey, you owe us one here. Try to do that for all 32 teams while trying to maximize distribution of these assets so that the fans can watch the games they want to see. So is it San Francisco the one that travels the most this year? They're the ones that have the lot. That's going to happen no matter what, right? Anybody getting on an airplane

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