Winners, losers of 2017 NFL schedule release

Winners, losers of 2017 NFL schedule release

By Kevin Seifert

The NFL revealed its 2017 schedule Thursday night, and I was inspired to declare instant winners and losers with a full understanding that not a single meaningful game will be played for more than four months.

All data is courtesy of the fast-calculating folks at ESPN Stats & Information.

Winners

Broadcasters and national-television viewers

Last year's ratings slide for the NFL clearly impacted the league's schedule-making process. For the first time in five years, neither the Cleveland Browns nor the Jacksonville Jaguars will play in prime time. (They both have "national" games in the 9:30 a.m. ET slot from London.) Instead, the league packed its prime-time schedule with its best draws.

Ten teams have five or more prime-time games, not including potential flex scheduling later in the season. That list includes the obvious candidates, among them the Dallas Cowboys, Green Bay Packers, New England Patriots and Pittsburgh Steelers.

The Cowboys -- the NFL's ratings gold mine -- also have nine late-afternoon kickoffs that traditionally draw larger audiences. Their only 1 p.m. ET kickoffs come in Weeks 4 and 17. The latter, at the Philadelphia Eagles, would likely be moved to a later time if it has playoff implications.

The Browns, on the other hand, are scheduled to kick off all but one of their games at 1 p.m. ET or earlier.


Uncommitted Los Angeles fans

In their first season together in the Los Angeles market, the Rams and Chargers will play at the same day and time for nearly half of their home schedules. It's difficult to know what to make of that odd occurrence.

Is the NFL confident that each team will carve out its own fan base quickly enough to avoid limiting support on those parallel game days? Do they know that it will be a long climb, especially for the Chargers, regardless of the schedule? Or do they realize it is simply a temporary circumstance that will end when the teams move into the Rams' new stadium in 2019?

The answer is probably a combination of those factors, but in the big picture, it is a reminder of how jumbled this arrangement is and will be for a couple of seasons.

Both teams will kick off in the 1 p.m. local time window in Weeks 2, 14 and 17. The Rams will play in the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum, a cavernous 93,000-seat stadium that was perhaps half-full for games by the end of last season. The Chargers will play 12 miles away in the StubHub Center, a soccer stadium that will seat 30,000 for football.

The size of the Chargers' home crowd might make traffic logistics a little less relevant. But from a big picture, the NFL has put the limited number of Los Angeles football fans in position to choose between teams for three of the eight weeks. The Chargers already have sold out their season tickets, so it's going to be a lot easier to find a seat for a Rams game at the Coliseum. It's not the crime of the century, but it is far from ideal and indicative of the NFL's herky-jerky return to the country's second-largest market.

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