Inside the NFL schedule puzzle: Byes, Christmas, overseas trips and Taylor Swift

The NFL rolled out its 272-game masterpiece Wednesday night in unveiling the league’s 2024 schedule, eagerly anticipated by fans and the final result of millions of permutations crunched by supercomputers to satisfy billion-dollar TV partners, maximize national audiences and make 32 teams feel like they got a fair shake.

League officials called the process “an incredibly challenging puzzle” and likened it to finding “the best grain of sand on the beach,” with nearly endless options complicated by the league now playing games on almost every day of the week.

“We keep taking needles out, and the haystack is essentially infinite,” said Mike North, the NFL’s vice president of broadcast planning, on a conference call with reporters on Thursday.

The morning after, having enjoyed every team’s creative videos laying out their 2024 opponents, we take a closer look at the nuances and difficulties not only in creating the schedule, but for some teams, playing the hand dealt to them.

[2024 NFL schedule release videos: Chargers, Patriots, Cowboys among those going viral]

Every day but Tuesdays now

The NFL used to be a quaint Sunday affair with a single encore on Monday night each week. That expanded to Thursday nights in 2006. Now, the league’s games cover nearly every day of the week. The two-time defending Super Bowl champion Chiefs will play a game on every day of the week except Tuesday this season, including on Christmas Day, which is a Wednesday.

To wedge two Christmas games on Netflix — Chiefs at Steelers and Ravens at Texans — into the regular season, the league had to schedule the same four teams on a Saturday the week before, giving them the same short week that teams have when they play on a Thursday after a Sunday. So on Dec. 21, the Texans are at the Chiefs and the Steelers are at the Ravens, a five-day holiday round-robin of sorts that has each team hosting one game and playing one on the road.

The league didn’t want to just throw any team on the biggest holiday of the year, so the four teams involved were all playoff teams last year, and represent three of the last four AFC teams left in last season’s playoffs. The NFL once avoided Christmas, but ratings and feedback were strong last year, so the league is now actively seeking Christmas games, even when the day falls in the middle of the week.

Yes, Taylor Swift impacted the NFL schedule

Taylor Swift’s romance with Chiefs tight end Travis Kelce became one of the biggest off-field storylines of the 2023 NFL season, expanding the league’s fan base to a whole new demographic, and her wildly successful Eras tour had an impact on the 2024 schedule.

Swift has full concert weekends booked in three NFL venues during the season — at Miami on Oct. 18-20, at New Orleans Oct. 25-27 and in Indianapolis on Nov. 1-3 — so the league knew the Dolphins, Saints and Colts would be on the road those weeks.

And while the league says it’s a coincidence, the Chiefs’ game at Buffalo on Nov. 17 comes right after Swift has three concerts in Toronto on Nov. 14-16, allowing fans (and perhaps a certain significant other) to make the hour’s drive south for the game.

“I saw a lot of conspiracy theories talking about Kansas City at Buffalo, middle of the season, right when Taylor’s playing Toronto,” North said. “That one definitely did not hit our radar screen.”

North conceded that the Chiefs’ popularity makes them “Cowboys-level assets” for the TV partners, so giving each network a piece of the Kansas City ratings boom was a priority for the league.

Division games increasingly later

The NFL likes to save its divisional games for later in the year, knowing they’re more impactful to the playoff picture and carry more weight, so it’s more than just Week 18 having exclusively divisional games.

This year’s slate has 50 of the 96 games — more than half — falling in the final seven weeks of the season, and some teams are unusually skewed to later in the year. The Bears and Steelers don’t play a single division game until Week 11, and then have all six divisional games in the final eight weeks.

Other teams are oddly tilted early in the year — the Saints have just one division game in the final eight weeks, and the Falcons have a cluster of four division games between Week 4 through 8. Three teams — the Bills, Eagles and Titans — close out the year with three straight division games.

Normally, two games against the same division opponent are spread out over the course of the season, but that can’t always be the case. There are three instances of division opponents playing twice in a span of three weeks: The Cardinals and Seahawks play in Week 12 and 14, as do the Browns and Steelers, and the Bills and Patriots meet in Week 16 and again in Week 18.

The 49ers have it rough

One nuance of the NFL schedule is uneven prep time. The league calls it “negative rest disparity” when one team has more days to rest and prepare for a game than the other, usually a function of a bye week or coming off a Thursday game. Across the league, it evens out for everyone, but every year, there’s a team or two that gets the short end.

For the second year in a row, the 49ers have four games against opponents who are coming off their bye week, giving them an extra week to work up a game plan for the defending NFC champs. These aren’t easy opponents either. San Francisco faces that disadvantage against the Chiefs in Week 7, Cowboys in Week 8, Seahawks in Week 11 and the Bills in Week 13. The Niners do enjoy the same advantage once, as their bye week gives them an edge against the Bucs in Week 10.

One more disadvantage for San Francisco: Two of its opponents will get a three-day head start, coming off Thursday night games the week before, with the Patriots in Week 4 and the Bears in Week 14.

Overseas trips don’t require bye weeks afterward

NFL teams playing games overseas in Europe have the right to ask for a bye week after the long trip, but some teams will waive that right, especially if it helps them get a week off later in the regular season.

The Jaguars, Jets and Patriots will all play games in the week immediately after a game in Europe, but doing so gives them their byes much later — four weeks later for the Jaguars and six weeks later for the Jets and Patriots. Four other teams playing overseas — the Vikings, Bears, Panthers and Giants — will take their bye immediately after that trip, all in Week 11 or earlier.

North said teams are finding that because the Europe games are played at 9:30 a.m. ET, they’re able to return home even earlier than they would playing a Sunday night game two or three time zones away.

[2024 NFL schedule release: Win-loss predictions, analysis for every team]

Are three straight road games unfair?

In terms of where games are played, the league tries to avoid long runs to either extreme — too many home games in one cluster, too many road games in a row — but some outlier streaks are inevitable.

“We talk about three-game road trips as though it’s the worst thing you could do to a team, and I’m not really sure that’s true,” North said. “You play two-game road trips all the time and nobody says anything about them. So you’re talking about a third game in a three-week sequence that happens to be on the road. … We could break up somebody’s three-game road trip by giving them a home game against Kansas City or San Francisco. Is that really better?”

There are four teams in 2024 that have three straight road games: The Bills and Browns do so in Weeks 4-6, the Vikings in Weeks 10-12 and the Bears in Weeks 13-15. Of those four, three are immediately next to a three-game home stand — the Bears before their road trip and the Browns and Vikings after theirs.

There are six other instances of teams getting three straight at home: The Cardinals get theirs Weeks 2-4, the Falcons in Weeks 3-5, the Chargers in Weeks 10-12 and most notably the Jets, who close out the regular season with three home games. The Rams and Saints have a four-week stretch with three home games and a bye, giving them 35 days between road games.

Greg Auman is FOX Sports’ NFC South reporter, covering the Buccaneers, Falcons, Panthers and Saints. He is in his 10th season covering the Bucs and the NFL full-time, having spent time at the Tampa Bay Times and The Athletic. You can follow him on Twitter at @gregauman.

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