The Kansas City Chiefs are the hottest ticket in town, finding their way all over the prime-time schedule in 2024. While it certainly helps the Chiefs are the two-time defending Super Bowl champions and have Patrick Mahomes at quarterback, the fact Taylor Swift is dating Travis Kelce certainly attracts more viewers.
No matter which storyline the Chiefs possess, they draw in viewers. The NFL certainly took account of that when making the 2024 schedule, having the Chiefs with a league-high eight standalone games -- including contests on Monday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday and Sunday.
The Chiefs play on every day of the week, except Tuesday. There was a reasoning behind them playing these exclusive windows.
"They're Cowboys-level assets right now," NFL broadcast planning vice president Mike North said of the Chiefs in a conference call Thursday, via Arrowhead Pride. "Knowing that everybody's going to get a certain number of them, being able to pull two Kansas City games out of the mix, put them in a TBD-black box kind of holding spot for the Saturday-Wednesday round robin at the end, we wanted to make sure that we still felt like we could deliver quality Kansas City inventory."
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.
In total, the Chiefs play in the 1 p.m. ET window just three times. The first one isn't until Week 10. Kansas City plays 14 of its 17 games in the 4:25 p.m. ET spot or later. They are a hot commodity around the league.
"They're obviously one of the biggest brands we have," North told CBS Sports lead NFL insider Jonathan Jones Wednesday night. "Defending Super Bowl champions, and we've used them historically. You know, we've used them to prop up some of these national television windows that maybe are kind of shifting viewer behavior and trying to remind people that, hey, there's other ways to access NFL content.
"Whether it was the wild game on Peacock last year, obviously using them on Black Friday this year to continue to try to build that brand, and certainly the, Wednesday afternoon Christmas game."
