NFL Exec Mike North on the Challenges of Scheduling the 2026 Season

Mike North is the NFL's VP of broadcast planning, which means for about a week every year he is the most-texted person in football. Then he goes back into his hole.

"It's Groundhog Day," North said. "They take me out of my hole, they parade me around for a couple days, and then they put me in my hole, and I'll see you next spring."

Rich brought him on the show the day after the 2026 schedule release. The first real question landed on the part nobody outside the league fully appreciates: what was the biggest challenge this year?

North said the answer comes down to expectations rising along with everything else.

"Everybody's gotten smarter," North said. "We were lucky for decades, sitting in that room with Val Pinchbeck, hanging the tags on the board one at a time, and we were lucky to get a schedule done. Now, stakes are higher. There's 100 billion reasons why we need to do a good job here."

He rattled off the constraint set without taking a breath. Stadium availability. Player health and safety. Weather. Travel. Rest disparity. Bye weeks. Nine international games. A Wednesday night game before Thanksgiving. Thanksgiving and Christmas slates that have grown into their own thing.

"This isn't getting any easier," North said.

The biggest stadium pressure this year came from the FIFA World Cup. North said the impact is concentrated in preseason. The World Cup wraps by mid-July, and a handful of venues asked for one extra week of road games in Week 1 of the preseason to make sure they were ready.

"Regular season shouldn't be impacted by that," North said.

The bigger ongoing issue is that NFL teams only use their buildings 10 times a year. Concerts, conventions, and rock tours get booked into those buildings, and occasionally a tour wanders into the fall.

"No team ever wants to say to their coach or general manager, hey, we had to put ourselves on the road a couple of weeks in a row, or lack of early-season home primetime games, because we had to block the building for a rock concert," North said. "Everybody handles it a little bit differently."

The software solves what the manual era could not.

"Now, the software, the hardware, our tech partners, the strategy, the optimization, the heuristics, all the work that goes into finding the best solution to this puzzle, we can accommodate it for the most part," North said.

Rich pivoted to the broadcast map. CBS, Fox, ESPN, Peacock, NBC, Netflix, Amazon Prime. North does not see it as a money question.

"It's really about how do we get the games where the fans are ingesting their content," North said.

He cited the four games returning to ESPN this year. He took a moment to mourn the loss of the Monday Night Football side-by-side doubleheader from previous years.

"I still don't understand how we lost containment on that," North said. "Everybody hated it. I thought it was fun. I thought it was a good idea."

Some of those returned games went to Netflix. Some went to broadcast. NBC and Fox each picked up an extra game.

"Broadcast television's been very good to the National Football League," North said. "There's a reach that's still unduplicated by the streaming partners, but you're starting to see an Amazon game get up to broadcast television level viewership numbers. That 30 million for the wild card game last year, that's as much as any broadcast network had ever done on a Saturday night wild card."

North pointed to Christmas on Netflix as another proof point. Twenty-eight million.

"The fans are there," North said. "They vote with their remotes. They tell us where they want to get their content. Everybody's got Netflix. Everybody watches Stranger Things. Everybody's got Amazon Prime. We all need paper towels. We're going to where the fans are."

He flagged a few of the new windows to watch. The Wednesday Night Football before Thanksgiving is a first.

"One way to build a foothold in any window is to put a pretty good game there," North said. "So a good game like Packers-Rams on Wednesday night. A good game like Niners-Rams in Melbourne. A good game on Christmas like Seattle-San Francisco on Fox."

The data, North said, keeps proving the room right.

"Most-watched season in whatever it was, 15 years last year," North said. "And still more Sunday Ticket subscribers than ever before. The fans know they can watch any game they want with the right product. I think it's working."