A Conversation With: An NFL Schedule Maker

The Chargers 2024 schedule features four back-to-back road trips, three primetime games and the same opponent in Weeks 1 and 18.

We chatted with Charlotte Carey, the NFL Director of Broadcasting, who is a key member is helping generate each team’s schedule.

Here’s our 1-on-1 conversation with Carey:

Thank you for your time, Charlotte. Now that the 2024 schedule is out, what was the biggest challenge wth this year’s edition?

Carey: It’s always one big puzzle piece. I would say, you know, the problem gets harder and harder every year. The pieces I think that were the most challenging this year, beyond just the regular stadium blocks and everything else — you can talk about Taylor Swift always coming through and blocking a couple of our stadiums throughout the course of the season — but the biggest difference is we have the Christmas round robin in Week 16 and 17. That was an interesting piece this year, with the additional windows in order to play on Wednesday, we had to move two of the games to Saturday so that the teams that were playing Wednesday could play Saturday to Wednesday.

So you needed four teams that were going to play each other and then you had a little round robin with two teams playing each other on Saturday each and then coming back and playing the other teams on Wednesday. So a pretty fun way to handle Christmas, but it was a bit of a challenge from a window perspective, particularly in Week 17. So finding the right mix of teams and games and inventory for all of those different windows was definitely a challenge and something that we focused on this year, but we think we landed in a really good place.

Generally speaking, what is the NFL’s view of the Chargers heading into 2024?

Carey: We’re excited about them. You’ll see we definitely are using the Chargers in a primetime, ESPN game — The Harbaugh Bowl — which we’re very excited about. That’s a big story going into the season, and kind of…