The Kansas City Chiefs certainly have one of the weirdest NFL schedules to date, starting with playing on every day of the week but Tuesday. Kansas City plays 14 of its 17 games in the 4:25 p.m. ET spot or later. And this is in addition to opening the season on Thursday night, playing Black Friday, having a Week 16 game on a Saturday and suiting up for a Week 17 game on Christmas (which is a Wednesday).
Head coach Andy Reid didn’t see the schedule beforehand, nor does he care about the draw the Chiefs got.
“It’s the first time in my career that this has happened, it’s unique and you know how we are, we don’t really care. They can give us a Tuesday game if they want, and we’ll be okay there, too,” Reid said, via a Chiefs transcript. “We work through it, we’ll play anybody, anywhere, whatever they want to do. We’re on board.”
The NFL certainly took account of that when making the 2024 schedule, giving the Chiefs a league-high eight standalone games — including contests on Monday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday and Sunday. The networks certainly wanted a piece of the Chiefs, too.
The Chiefs have four games on NBC, including the NFL Kickoff Game and the Saturday game before Christmas (plus two “Sunday Night Football” games). They have two “Monday Night Football” games on ESPN and are part of the first NFL Christmas Day games on Netflix. Kansas City also has eight games on CBS, which is a league high for the network, and four of them are in the 4:25 p.m. ET slot.
It’s the price the Chiefs have paid for winning consecutive Super Bowls and three championships in five years.
“I feel like our schedule has gotten crazier and crazier every single year,” said Patrick Mahomes last week. “It’s just about preparing for the week ahead of you. We know that we’re going to have a lot of prime-time games. We’ve built up the equity to be able to be in those games.
“Now it’s about how can we find a way to be better than we were last year at the end of the season, learn from our mistakes from last year, try to motivate ourselves to get ourselves healthier faster and go out there and win those games because there’s a lot of great football teams we play at the end there.”
The Chiefs end the season at the Cleveland Browns on a Sunday, followed by a Saturday game hosting the Houston Texans, then the Christmas Day game at the Pittsburgh Steelers. The regular season finale is at the Denver Broncos.
While Mahomes doesn’t have any of those games circled, he does want to avenge one of last season’s results.
“I’m going to try to be better on Christmas,” Mahomes said. “Because last Christmas was not great.”
