With the NFL schedule release having come and gone, we now must take our sweet time to dissect all 32 teams' regular-season slates. We have known the opponents, home and away, but the order and the timeslots often intrigue us. With there being more primetime games than ever before, everyone should get one, right? Not so fast. Three teams will not be showcased in primetime.
Mike Florio of Pro Football Talk pointed out that the Cleveland Browns, the New Orleans Saints and the Tennessee Titans do not have a single primetime game between them. Cleveland does have a standalone game in Week 5 when they "host" the Minnesota Vikings at Tottenham Hotspur Stadium in London, but that will be a 9:30 a.m. ET kick. Clearly, the NFL thinks these three teams will surely stink.
And to be fair, the league might be spot-on. New Orleans could be the worst team in football. While Cam Ward does offer Tennessee a brighter chance for tomorrow, nobody is watching the Titans outside of Nashville and other AFC South markets. Cleveland is the one I do not understand, as the Browns could be markedly better than they were a year ago. They just need better quarterback play.
It should be noted that all three of these teams could have their games late in the season flexed in.
Why Browns, Saints and Titans are not playing in any primetime games
What you have to remember is the NFL is, at its core, a television product. When the league puts a game into a primetime slot, they are hoping for a national audience, one that reaches far beyond that of the two metropolises each fan base largely hails from. While games can be flexed into Sunday Night Football later on down the line, you are locked into the Monday and Thursday night games.
In theory, the NFL could have shoehorned in all three of these teams into playing a division rival in a Thursday night game. Then again, does Amazon really want to be forced games featuring the Browns, Saints and Titans at this time? It is a new paradigm in NFL scheduling, so we better get on board. My final thought is which of these teams will most likely end up playing in a primetime game this season?
The smart money would be on Tennessee, strictly because Ward is their new starting quarterback. If Tennessee is at least playoff viable down the stretch, we could see the Titans play someone like rival Jacksonville late in the season. They also face Kansas City at home late in the season, so that could pull in a few extra eyeballs in what would otherwise be an anonymous game.
At this time, the only team I would be stunned to play in primetime of these three is New Orleans.