While the NFL won’t release the 2024 schedule until tomorrow night, it has already announced a handful of games. Others will leak out from now until 8 PM/EST Wednesday. According to 93.7 The Fan’s Andrew Fillipponi, he’s hearing the Pittsburgh Steelers will host the Kansas City Chiefs on Christmas Day this year.
While Fillipponi has been wrong or speculated wildly before, to his credit, he was aces with his schedule leaks last season. He and The Fan had the Steelers’ entire schedule revealed hours before the team’s official release and he was perfect with his reporting, making this tweet more credible than others and the reason why we’re passing it along.
Many will surely hope he’s wrong. A Christmas Day game would take place on a Wednesday and for out-of-network Steelers fans, of which there are many, they’ll likely have to watch the game on Netflix. Those in-market would be able to watch on cable. Last week, Puck’s John Ourand reported that Netflix is likely to be given the rights to both Christmas games this year, continuing the league’s trend of online-exclusive games.
It would join Amazon, which hosts Thursday night games, and NBC’s streaming service Peacock, which hosts one Wild Card game per year and one the Steelers were nearly on last year before the playoff seeding broke in a different direction. However, Mike Florio reported last night that Amazon and one mystery service, possibly Google/YouTube, remain in the mix to buy rights to at least one if not both games.
While not an airtight report, we know the Steelers will host the Chiefs at some point this year. And we know it won’t come in the first two weeks of the season. Kansas City will host Baltimore in Week 1 and head to Cincinnati in Week 2. It’s likely the NFL will spread out the rest of the AFC North schedule, making a late-season Kansas City versus Pittsburgh matchup logical.
If the Steelers do play on Christmas against any opponent, it means they’ll play the “week” before on Saturday. NFL commissioner Roger Goodell confirmed as much during a draft weekend interview with Pat McAfee.
“Wednesday-Saturday works. We’ll have four teams playing Saturday. We’ll mix them up and play them again on Christmas Day,” Goodell said.
Expect more leaks to come out tonight and tomorrow. We already know a narrowing field of who the team will play in Week 1 with many options already excluded based on official NFL releases. It won’t be the Ravens, Chiefs, Browns, Eagles, Jets, or Cowboys. The two most likely possibilities are road games at Denver or at Atlanta, the latter which has been rumored by Fillipponi and NFL Network’s Brian Baldinger.
We’ll have a running update of leaks and reports about the Steelers’ 2024 schedule tomorrow.
