Mike Tirico advocates flexibility in NFL schedule

Whether it’s through New Year’s resolutions or a new perspective on long-standing traditions, everyone is looking for change.

It’s that time of year.

We already saw Joel Klatt say that Army-Navy should be moved to Week 0. And that idea worked better in his head than in reality. Meanwhile, Mike Tirico has his own proposal for the NFL — and from a scheduling standpoint, it makes a lot more sense than Klatt’s proposal.

While their proposals are hardly in the same breath – a mere coincidence that two of football’s top advertisers are calling for major scheduling shifts – Tirico’s proposal during a recent SI Media with Jimmy Traina podcast seems much more practical.

“I would love if the league could find a way to pivot so that Thanksgiving, the last five weeks of the season, was scheduled as the Premier League where we know the matchups but we have no designation and maybe Nov. 1 you starting to point out some of the windows – just like Thursday’s,” Tirico Traina said.

“Thursday, you have to go all the way out — I get that. But you start to designate the Monday windows and the Sunday windows, and as we get closer, you do what we just saw in Week 17 where we say, ‘OK, there’s a pool of games here, three of them will be on the NFL Network on Saturday, one and the other two will be slotted in somewhere.’

“I just think teams go from really good to bad teams so quickly, or an injury changes a team. It would be best, not only for the network partners, which is our concern, but it would be best for the fans because you get the best games in these standalone windows.

“We don’t mind and understand that you get some games at 1 or 4 that aren’t the best games, but in the 4:25 window, the Sunday night window, the Monday night window, if you get a dog, if you get a bad game, it’s not good for the momentum of the season. So I really wish they could come and do something to make it real.”

Traina agreed, calling it one of the best ideas he’s heard. He added that it’s frustrating when networks get bogged down with a poorly timed game that doesn’t live up to the hype, and he noted that flexibility would ease some of that pressure.

“That’s why it would really benefit everyone to just put placeholders in,” Tirico explained. “You’ve got to play Week 16, we’ll figure it out — and Thursdays you’ve got to schedule a little bit there because of rest. So I’m taking Thursdays out of the mix… We slipped a game from a Sunday to a Monday last year; games slide around the Sunday slot. I’m very sensitive to the fans – you want to give them some time – so you have three, four weeks to plan early game, late game or night game.

“Because I’ve seen it firsthand where it’s disruptive when the time changes on a game. But I think it would be the easiest thing to do in a league that’s less predictable than ever when you sitting and making the schedule in March and April… This could just be a way to tweak it better.”

(SI Media with Jimmy Traina)