Multiview: Perfect storm gives football fans perfect Saturday

Mike Williams will line up across from Nate Wiggins when the Steelers battle the Ravens on Saturday. At the same time, 1,500 miles away in Austin, Texas, their former Clemson coaches and teammates will battle Texas in the first round of the 12-team College Football Playoff.

People of a certain age will remember days on which multiple TVs were required in living rooms to simultaneously consume multiple games. Not anymore.

For more than 100 years, the NFL has attempted to avoid major conflicts with the college schedule. In turn, college football has even allowed the NFL to take over New Year’s Day when necessary to play Sunday schedules. But aside from Thursday night games and occasional December bowl contests, this Saturday is probably the biggest conflict in the history of the two entities … although it’s a fantastic day for football fans. A perfect storm of broadcast circumstances created a perfect football day on the first day of Winter.

Saturday’s schedule, sent straight from Heaven:

• 12 p.m. ET: SMU (11) at Penn State (6), TNT/Max
• 1 p.m. ET: Houston Texans at Kansas City Chiefs, NBC/Peacock
• 4 p.m. ET: Clemson (12) at Texas (5), TNT/Max
• 4:30 p.m. ET: Pittsburgh Steelers at Baltimore Ravens, FOX
• 8 p.m. ET: Tennessee (9) at Ohio State (8), ESPN/ABC

Netflix gave the NFL $150 million reasons to brand Christmas as appointment television for the streaming giant. That, combined with Christmas falling on a Wednesday and the first year of an expanded CFP bracket will cross paths on Saturday.

In order to schedule two games on Christmas Day, the NFL had to take the four participating teams – Pittsburgh travels to Kansas City and Baltimore visits Houston — and work backward. The league had to schedule those four teams on the prior Saturday in order to meet the minimum three days of rest between games. That also meant that playing the previous Sunday – last week – created a daunting hurdle of three games over an 11-game stretch for each of the four teams, all of whom have either clinched or likely will clinch playoff berths.

And especially because they’re playoff teams, no executive in the NFL’s broadcasting department or anyone at Netflix will sleep until the streaming company executes two games without glitches on Christmas Day. When Netflix steamed the Nov. 15 Jake Paul-Mike Tyson fight from AT&T Stadium, buffering issues and livestream crashing made for some unhappy customers among the 108 million viewers across the world. Patrick Mahomes and Lamar Jackson will likely draw more eyeballs this upcoming week.

“The sheer tonnage of people that came to watch was incredible,” Netflix executive Brandon Riegg told Joe Reedy of the Associated Press, referring to Paul-Tyson. “And for all the testing that the engineering team had done ahead of that, and I think they’re the best in the business, the only way to test something of that magnitude is to have something of that magnitude.

“We never want to have technical issues or a disappointing experience for our members. There was a subset of people that were watching that struggled with that and we acknowledge that. The good news is they stress-tested the system to such a degree that there’s a lot of these fixes and improvements that they realized that they could make, and they’re applying all that stuff.”

All that stuff hopefully translates to a flawless Christmas experience because Netflix also is scheduled to stream NFL games on the holiday in 2025 and 2026.

For more information on NFL broadcasting, visit the broadcasting page at ProFootballPost.com.