Increasingly, the NFL schedule release is evidence that the league itself knows what you like. And with each year, the folks in charge are going to be guessing less and less.
On Thursday, through my half-hour conversation with NFL VP of broadcast planning Mike North and VP of broadcasting Onnie Bose, that much became increasingly clear in how they talked about their audience, how they broke down their partners and how they reach their conclusion in solving a giant Rubik’s Cube with 272 little boxes on its sides.
North used to be one of the guys pulling tags off a giant board—in what surely was a smoke-filled Manhattan conference room—to try to arrange a schedule that made sense for the league, its teams and its broadcast partners. Decades later, much of that guesswork has been replaced.
