The Kansas City Chiefs will raise their Super Bowl banner on opening night in September and then take on the Detroit Lions in the first regular season game of the 2023 NFL season. The league unveiled the full 272-game schedule on Thursday.
Chiefs/Lions probably wasn’t the matchup a lot of people expected to see for that Thursday night, but the NFL’s vice president of broadcasting Onnie Bose told Dan Patrick that despite the Lions not being a playoff team last year, there was just something about Detroit that stuck with the schedule makers.
“That’s one of the ones that we had some of our more passionate discussions about,” Bose said of discussions amongst the group making the schedules. “A couple things to factor in there. One, when you start with the Kansas City Chiefs and Patrick Mahomes any Super Bowl champion is going to be attractive. But when you’ve got them in there, you know that game’s going to have a high amount of attention, it’s going to get a lot of viewership.”
“We left ourselves open-minded,” he added. “There’s a lot of years where we might say ‘This is the one game that we’re going to play on Kickoff’. This year we said there’s a lot of games we’d consider, and as we went through the process, the Lions were one of those teams we left in there. We really like that narrative around that team.”
Bose said Kansas City has a very strong slate of home opponents this year, and that virtually any game would’ve made sense for the opener. He said they considered the Bengals, Bills and Eagles, but ultimately they thought about the last Sunday Night Football game of last season, where the Lions entered knowing they weren’t playoff bound but still played hard and rallied to beat the Packers at Lambeau to keep them out of the postseason as well.
Bose felt like there’s a lot good going for Detroit, and thought they were deserving of the chance to be in a marquee primetime spot to open the new year.
“There’s a lot of energy there, and we feel really good about starting the season with that energy against the Super Bowl champs,” he said.
