The Jets have seven standalone games — six of them in prime-time — during the first 11 weeks of the season. During a Thursday conference call with reporters, NFL V.P. of broadcast planning Mike North provided a surprisingly candid explanation.
“Yes, it’s an awful lot of prime-time games early in the season, but, obviously, I feel like Jets kind of owe us one,” North said, via Rich Cimini of ESPN.com. (Thanks, Rich, for typing it up. I was putting off working back through the recording of the one-hour call to find the right spot.)
“When we had this conversation a year ago, we were -- all of us -- all-in on the Jets, and for that guy to last four plays was disheartening for many of us,” North added. “I feel like we could run it back, and certainly our broadcast partners, when they came to us early in the process talking about what storylines they want to focus on early in the season, obviously Aaron Rodgers’s return was a key one for everybody. . . . Hopefully, he stays healthy and, hopefully, they’re relevant.”
The schedule, of course, will make it harder for him to stay healthy. Three games in 10 days to start the season, after a full year since he played four snaps. Twice, he’ll play on Sunday and then again on Thursday. (If he stays healthy long enough to do so.)
And the notion that the Jets “owe us one” seems a little odd. The Jets don’t owe anyone anything. They didn’t have a disastrous season on purpose. They wanted to have Rodgers play all year. They gained no unjust benefit from not delivering on the prime-time promise that the NFL built up last year by making the Jets one of the showcase teams for the 2023 schedule.
Really, why would anyone assume a 39-year-old quarterback would stay healthy all year? Why is anyone assuming it will happen this year?
To maximize its chance at payback, the league has given the Jets a schedule with all of the prime-time games before their Week 12 bye. If Rodgers survives and if the Jets are still in contention, they’ll be in the mix to have even more games down the stretch moved to later time slots. (Hooray?)
Regardless of how it plays out, the Jets shouldn’t be put in a tougher spot this year because they ended up in the toughest of spots last year. While it’s important for the NFL to placate broadcast partners and the goal, as always, is to maximize ratings, it seems unfair to saddle the jets and their now-40-year-old quarterback to play so many night games and two short-week games in the first half of the season, simply because they only got four snaps from Rodgers in 2023.
