The Chiefs have come to expect seeing something funky when the NFL schedule is released.
The NFL had the Chiefs play on six different days of the week in the 2024 season. This year, they have a whopping seven prime-time games, and that doesn’t include the Thanksgiving Day game at the Dallas Cowboys.
Mike North, the NFL’s vice president of broadcast planning and scheduling, admitted the league leans on the Chiefs because of their immense popularity.
“Anybody who’s been watching football for the last few years knows that the Chiefs have almost kind of surpassed the Cowboys really as the bell cow,” North said on the “Up & Adams” show. “And this is what happens when you’re pop culture, part of the fabric of the country right now. And this is par for the course for the Chiefs.”
The Chiefs have surpassed the Cowboys as America’s Team. The top-three highest rated NFL broadcasts of the 2025 season have been Chiefs games: Week 2 vs. Eagles, Week 9 vs. the Bills and Week 11 vs. the Broncos, per Sports Media Watch.
The NFL always has huge ratings on Thanksgiving, but the league schedule-makers decided to go for a record by putting the Chiefs-Cowboys game on the holiday.
Dallas’ game against the Giants in 2022 is the highest-rated regular season game (42.1 million viewers), according to Front Office Sports.
North said earlier this year on “The Rich Eisen Show” the NFL usually takes its top marquee games away from Thanksgiving. But the Chiefs-Cowboys contest will be an opportunity to see if a ratings record could be set.
“This year, we felt like we had the depth (of good games), we had the inventory, we had the quality,” North said. “And it was really Hans Schroeder, who runs our scheduling team, who really kind of first had the idea. ‘Why wouldn’t we test the ceiling? Why wouldn’t we take the Ferrari out of the garage? What could a Chiefs-Cowboys game do on Thanksgiving Day, afternoon?’”
North said he was initially against that plan, but he came around. The NFL thinks the viewership numbers could be gigantic.
“Hans was pretty convicted that we should at least be open to trying it,” North said. “I, of course, told him, ‘No, that’s a terrible idea,’ but he went to David Berson from CBS, had a conversation, went to the commissioner, and everybody started to get pretty comfortable with the idea if we could see what the rest of the schedule would look like. ...
“So we got comfortable with it and excited to see what it can do. What if we could push 48, 49, 50 million viewers for a regular-season game? That’s unthinkable, not that long ago.”
If the NFL can hit those viewership numbers on Thanksgiving, it not only would set a regular-season ratings record but would rival what networks get from a playoff game.