PALM BEACH, Fla. _ An AFC North donnybrook in Dublin. A Thanksgiving night game in Paycor Stadium. Nearly half the schedule in prime time.

All on the table for the Bengals this year.

While taking a breather from sifting through "hundreds of trillions," of possible schedules for 2025, Mike North, the NFL's vice president of broadcasting planning and scheduling, kept a date for Bengals.com senior writer Geoff Hobson's "The Conversation," during this week's annual league meeting.

Easing into a chair in the lobby of The Breakers, North may have been looking at one of his last shreds of sanity during the next six weeks as the schedule prepares to drop in mid-May.

If there is an infinite series of questions ranging from which teams get the holiday gifts of playing on Thanksgiving and Christmas Day to which teams play on the hellscape of a short-week road game on a Thursday night, North has a clear-eyed answer on one thing.

Like last season, when the Bengals played six prime-time games, they're going to be in more national television windows than Taylor Swift.

The Conversation

GH: Were your thoughts when you saw Ja’Marr Chase and Tee Higgins sign long-term deals that the Bengals automatically go to seven prime-time games?

MN: It's interesting. You've been doing this long enough to know we have so many more prime-time games than we've had, so there are a lot more national windows. There's a lot more opportunity for the teams that are worthy of national television to get additional national television.

There are teams that are going to have to probably play their way into prime time, and there are others that have earned it over the course of the last few years. I put the Bengals squarely in that category, and certainly retaining your stars is one way to ensure continued television exposure in this league.

GH: Is there such a thing, anymore, as a maximum amount of prime-time games?

MN: There's a maximum number of times you can appear somewhere other than Sunday afternoons with our television contracts, with our network partners. The AFC teams have to appear on CBS a certain number of times. Have to appear on FOX at some point. NBC, ESPN each get their requisite appearances. We generally try to keep it to about seven total prime-time games.

And that's a combination of fan friendliness, asking the fans to come out for more than half of the home schedule for night-time games is a heavy lift. And also for the travel, the wear and tear on the teams, especially when you travel out three time zones, and then play at night and then get back so late. So we try to keep it to about seven total primetimes.

GH: How far are you now through the process for a schedule that usually drops the second week in May?

MN: You know, it's funny, by this time most years, we might be pretty far along to the point where we've actually announced games at the annual meeting. We've announced Kickoff, Thanksgiving, international games. The way the process works now is so different. We don't build it chronologically, starting in Week One and working our way through. We kind of build it inside out. Here's the prime-time schedule, here's the double-headers, here's Christmas, here's Thanksgiving, and then fill in around it. The truth is, every team's Week One game could change from one day to the next. It's all about solving for 18 weeks, not just one week.

GH: How many possibilities are there?

MN: More than we could ever account. It's well into the hundreds of trillions. If you think about every single game could be any one of 17 weeks, 18 weeks, any one of six media partners, any one of eight times, any one of four days. Each individual team has hundreds of millions of possible schedules. And for each of those, there are hundreds of millions of schedules for each of their division opponents and everybody else. The number is truly almost infinite. We're looking for the one, the magical, mythical perfect schedule that makes all 32 teams and all of our media partners happy. And I'm not sure that exists.

GH: Never been done probably.

MN: Not yet.

GH: Why is it taking so long to announce at least some games?

MN: The honest answer is, we don't know. The way we're trying to solve the thing right now involves taking advantage of all the flexibility we can have. Let me give you a good example.

Cincy-Pitt. Play each other twice. Likely to have playoff implications, if previous seasons are any indication. So you probably don't want both of those games early in the season. You probably don't want them too close together. And now you think about all the options for that game.

Just think about Cincinnati. Could be playing Pittsburgh in Pittsburgh. Could be playing Pittsburgh in Dublin. Could be playing on a Sunday night, a Monday night, a Saturday afternoon. If the Bengals don't go to Dublin with the Steelers, they might end up going to Madrid with the Dolphins, and that's going to impact where else the Bengals could be scheduled the week before, the week of, the week after. So every game has many potential homes, and for each of those potential homes, there's a whole search tree that we have to go down and figure out: Is this the best use of that one game?

GH: The mayor of Madrid says the Bengals are going there to play the Dolphins

MN: Definitely a candidate. Little premature to announce that. I don't know how he knows if we don't know yet.

GH: So you don't know?

MN: Definitely do not know yet. Do not know any of the international games. Don't know Brazil, don't know UK. Don't know Berlin. Don't know Madrid. Sitting here on March 31, April 1, we've got six weeks. We'll know by then, but definitely no decisions made yet.

GH: Are the international games the first piece?

MN: No, they're treated like the rest. There are options. Think about Pittsburgh hosting in Dublin. The Bengals are a candidate. So are the Vikings, so are the Seahawks, so are the Bills. So if there are 100 million schedules for each of those four options, that's 400 million schedules we're going to try to search through and put our eyes on and put some metrics against and analytics and a scoring system to figure out, is this the best schedule?

And if so, is this the best use of Vikings-Steelers, Bengals-Steelers, Seahawk-Steelers, Bills-Steelers, and then multiply that conversation by all the international games, of which there's more than there's ever been. It's not the first piece to go, but it's a pretty constraining piece of the puzzle. There are truly an infinite number of potential international schedules.

GH: I can see why you're not there yet.

MN: The truth is, we're not sure what the right international games are. Not sure what the best use of Bengals at Steelers, Bengals at Dolphins, not to mention switching into playing into the NFC North this year and playing Green Bay, Chicago, Minnesota and Detroit. Those are all big games, so trying to figure out where every game could potentially go, and then figuring out where it should go.

GH: After the 2021 Super Bowl run, we've talked about how the Bengals became kind of one of the darlings of the league. Then they were in so many close games this last year. I would imagine they're still viewed as a good get for a game. It seems every time you put them on, it's decided at the end.

MN: Always, always, And look, the truth is they were actually a little unlucky last year, right? You think about the start of the season and the record that they got off to with the close losses. But down the stretch, they were maybe the most interesting story. Can the Bengals pull it together and save this thing? Finished, what (five wins) in a row?

They were arguably one of our best stories down the stretch. Usually, performance at the end of the last season carries over into the start of the next season. So I assume we're going to be thinking about the Bengals going into 2025 as the Bengals from the end of 2024, not the beginning of 2024.

GH: They got flexed out of a Week 16 Thursday night at home against Cleveland.

MN: It was interesting. Part of that was their record, but also their opponent's record, right? That Cleveland-Cincinnati game — four weeks out when we had to make a decision — had the potential to fall apart. No playoff implications for either team. We had to make that call last year a month in. (This year, ownership shortened that runway to three weeks instead of four.)

The closer we can get, the better decisions we can make. Obviously, there's an impact on the fans and the ticket holders and the travel and all that. The closer we get, maybe we don't end up flexing. I mean, Cleveland-Cincy is the perfect example.

Four weeks out it was like, 'We've got to flex this Chargers-Broncos game. It's sitting there, likely to be under distributed on Fox. Let's make the change.' If we had waited until maybe only a week or two out, which may not be practical with a Thursday game, but the longer we had waited, maybe the more likely we don't flex. Because the Bengals were still playing for something. At the end of the day, you've got a Chargers-Broncos game with significant playoff implications in the AFC on national television. That's a good use of flexible scheduling.

Was there an impact on the Browns, the Bengals, the Chargers, the Broncos? Yeah, but hopefully manageable, positive and a good story for our fans to be able to watch a game with playoff implications on a Thursday night on Amazon that they probably wouldn't have seen otherwise

GH: Denver had a 10-day break coming into Cincinnati after that flex.

MN: That 10-day rest is something we're still keeping an eye on. We've been playing full season Thursdays now for 15 years. There's enough data to show us, is that 10-day rest period a competitive advantage, or a comparative disadvantage?

The bye week used to be an incredible advantage. Teams coming out of their bye week had a significantly improved record. Now whether it's the CBA and having to give the guys four days off or whatever it is, now coming off the bye is a challenge. I think 11-5 last year teams had to play against a team coming off their bye. I don't know the bye week is an advantage, and I'm not sure the 10 days after the Thursday is the advantage.

GH: The visiting Thursday night teams on a short week have it rough, right?

MN: Every team has something where they feel like they got the short straw. Whether they got flexed out a couple of times. Whether they had too many short weeks Thursdays on the road. The earliest possible bye, a three-game road trip, a road game after a road prime-time game. Whatever it is, everybody has something they hate.

I just hope it's not the same thing year after year, and I hope it's not truly competitively onerous where I don't ever want the schedule maker to have an impact on the playoff chase. The players and the coaches should be doing that.

GH: The Bengals look like they're a team that's going to be in the mix for five, six, seven national windows in '25.

MN: I would imagine they will find themselves well- represented on the national television schedule.

GH: They have yet to play in this era on Thanksgiving or Christmas.

MN: It just happened the way the rotation worked, rotating the AFC North into either Dallas or Detroit in a year the AFC is the road team that was going to control it. That's not an option. That's not an issue anymore. Now any time the Bengals visit Detroit or Dallas, they're in the mix for Thanksgiving and certainly in the mix for potentially hosting or visiting somebody for a Thursday game on Thanksgiving night. That's only been a few years. Kind of rotating it around. Dallas and Detroit are traditional venues for Thanksgiving Day, but that Thanksgiving night game moves around, and you talk about that Cincy-Pittsburgh game, that could be a possible home. Could the Bengals and the Steelers meet each other on Thanksgiving night? That's an option as well.

GH: I would imagine you guys would love to get Joe Burrow overseas.

MN: Yeah, certainly. They're going to be on national television plenty. They will find themselves in national windows, and that may include a 9:30 Sunday morning international game on the NFL Network. That is definitely a possibility.

GH: As you lean back, what do you like about the Bengals as you craft the schedule? What are their attractive elements?

MN: The best thing about it is you look ahead. Cincinnati, Baltimore, Pittsburgh all competitive right down to Week 18 last year. Almost put three teams in the playoffs. They cross over, like we said, for their NFC opponents. That's a division that did put three teams into the playoffs in Minnesota, Detroit and Green Bay. So all those matchups in the NFC North and the AFC North, they sound like football games. They feel like football games, and they're going to all find themselves into pretty prominent national windows, I think.