NFL schedule announcement announement Screengrab via ESPN

The NFL Draft has been turned into an incredible production. What once took place in a hotel ballroom now is a traveling circus that attracts hundreds of thousands of people to cities around the country. And the NFL has taken the opportunity to cram as much into draft night as possible with special honorees, tributes, and everything else. However, it may have gone too far with an announcement about the NFL schedule.

Right before the Chicago Bears were set to make the 10th overall pick in the 2025 NFL Draft, the NFL had both NFL Network’s Colleen Wolfe and ESPN’s Laura Rutledge take to the stage.

Rutledge and Wolfe had some huge, groundbreaking, earth-shattering, world-changing news. They announced that the NFL schedule announcement would take place on May 14th.

Uhh… thanks?

The NFL has done a masterful job of controlling every minute of every hour of our lives and turning a league that plays on 17 Sundays in the fall into a 24/7/365 enterprise. But an NFL schedule announcement announcement is a bridge too far.

The NFL schedule release has been transformed into appointment viewing just like everything else involving the NFL. However, we already know which games will take place next season. All the schedule release will do is tell us the dates and times. However, even that can be endlessly analyzed and scrutinized, and it is now apparently being promoted as a major can’t-miss event.

We literally already knew that the NFL schedule announcement was coming in mid-May. Did we really need to interrupt the Top 10 of the NFL Draft to tell us this news? Could this not have been an e-mail? A press release? A tweet? Now, we need not one but two people to tell us the specific date for a schedule reveal. This may be the crown jewel of NFL self-indulgence.

Laura Rutledge and Colleen Wolfe did the best they could, but this was two minutes of our lives that we will never get back.