The NFL officially announced the announcement of the future announcement of the 2020 schedule, set to be announced two days from now, on Thursday, May 7. Ordinarily, the scheduled would be released in the first half of April, but due to the global extenuating circumstances, it was pushed back, originally scheduled for ‘no later than May 9’.
Now we will know all 256 games by 8PM on Thursday night. One thing that we already know about the schedule is that all games that were previously slated to be played overseas this year will now, of course, not be. Instead, the ‘home’ teams in those games will simply play, you know, at home.
Fortunately, the Pittsburgh Steelers were not among those teams who were scheduled to play overseas, though Art Rooney II continues to push to get his team into a game in front of their Mexican fans, in which country they are perhaps the most popular team.
As is always the case, a lot of the details of the schedule are going to be leaked before they are actually revealed. Certain primetime games are going to be revealed, in particular, and you can often piece together other bits through the process of elimination.
We won’t know everything, of course, until we have everything, but chances are, the Steelers will be given the maximum of five primetime games. That is the case nearly every year, given the franchise’s popularity and their success in recent years. Last season, in fact, they even played six primetime games after one late-season game was flexed into a primetime slot after they had already played in five night games.
Of course, the one thing about the schedule that had long been known was whom each team would play. Only two games every year are undetermined by the start of the previous season, since the schedule works on a cyclical basis.
Based on teams’ 2019 win-loss records, the Steelers are supposed to have the second-easiest schedule in 2020, behind only the Baltimore Ravens, but we know how drastically these things can change based on how teams improve from one season to the next, as well as relative to the specific circumstances of that game when the time comes for it to be played.
We will bring you more details about what the Steelers’ schedule will look like as the information is leaked, which could start as early as today. Frankly, the most interesting bit of information will be how the season is structured in order to accommodate the potential need for modification.
