NEW YORK — As with most things in the National Football League, “news” is a word to be taken very lightly. Take the annual release of the NFL schedule, which happens in a lull period before the NFL draft, designed to give some breathless coverage for the programming-hungry NFL Network. The channel was running a countdown clock in the corner of the screen on its Thursday TV shows, showing how many hours, minutes and seconds were left before the release of the schedule Thursday at 8 p.m. ET.
“Really, the process couldn’t be more boring,” the schedule czar, NFL vice president Howard Katz, said late Thursday inside the small, rectangular scheduling den, The Val Pinchbeck Room, on the fifth floor of the NFL offices on Park Avenue.