The NBA and NHL continue their long playoff grinds, with enough teams still alive to offer plenty of drama on a nightly basis.

Major League Baseball continues to draw great reviews due to the crisper pace of play.

Golf’s second major of 2023, the PGA Championship, begins this coming week at a classic American major venue, Oak Hill in Rochester, N.Y.

Lots of noise out there in the sporting world — including the extreme type, with May at Indy cranking to life and NASCAR returning to one of its long-ago museum pieces, North Wilkesboro.

Yep, quite a variety of sports-entertainment alternatives out there these days.

And guess what just soaked up all the oxygen …

The NFL schedule release. 

Man, talk about running up the score. The NFL, long ago ascending to the top of America’s sporting heap, refuses to even glance at the cruise control. It’s all gas, all day. And damn near every day.

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This past Thursday’s official release of each team’s 2023 schedule was preceded by strategic leaking of certain marquee games — Chiefs-Lions to open the season, a Christmas tripleheader, etc. All done to build anticipation ahead of Thursday’s 8 p.m. unveiling of all 272 regular-season matchups.

This came quickly on the heels of the ’23 NFL Draft, which over the past decade has become a mammoth TV/social event with all teams clamoring to serve as host in future years. The NFL Combine, which isn’t just for scouts and pigskin junkies anymore, preceded the draft. 

This weekend brought three-day rookie mini-camps for most teams. And plenty of coverage.

Next up: The OTA’s. Organized Team Activities. Each team gets 10 days of workouts from late May through mid-June. Some teams like to clump their 10 days close together, others spread it out a bit — two days here, three there, one here, etc. Conveniently for the NFL, the news cycle never sleeps for those three weeks.

Then comes business class. Talk of contract negotiations, franchise tags, upset veterans, relieved signees, agents angling for air time and future clients. 

And finally, preseason camp and the buildup to another season of commercial success unlike anything since Jack Benny ruled radio and Ed Sullivan lorded over Sunday night TV.

You don’t have to be ancient to recall a time when an NFL team’s offseason marketing strategy centered on basketball. They'd slap together a springtime basketball roster and drive around the state to play in high school gyms. Quaint, huh?

Nowadays, the marketing opportunities are truly endless, largely because the needed tools are literally at everyone’s fingertips. The hard part these days is creativity, and one bright side to our current infatuation with social-media content, there are plenty of creators out there.

The latest wave of NFL-related hype came with Thursday’s schedule release. It’s now mandatory, or so it seems, for each team’s marketing team to produce a slick and hopefully unique video to introduce the season’s schedule. 

Some are good, some are better, some are truly excellent. Find any, or all, by simply typing a team’s name and “schedule video” in the search bar, and settle in. Or not. 

Will any of this help your team win an extra game or two this fall? You have to draw a lot of lines, connect a lot of dots, then branch out several more arteries to find the path from quality preseason productions to playoff drive. 

Part of it might be keeping up with the Joneses, but it also must be part of a league-wide desire to deliver a marketing effort worthy of the league’s status. You know, salmon don’t gather each spring to vote on swimming upstream — they just know to do it. Also with good reason, of course.

And with the NFL, there are billions to spend, so might as well spend it in a manner that’ll feed future media deals: With quality programming.

A glance at the Jacksonville Jaguars’ front-office roster shows a staff of 17 under the heading “Marketing.”

Among the jobs: Senior Marketing Manager, Brand.

Manager of Performance Marketing.

Social Content Producer.

Director of Brand Design and Creative.

Junior Graphic Designer.

Another Junior Graphic Designer. Why not?

In the old days of the circus, as the joke goes, the man shoveling behind the elephants was asked why he doesn’t quit such a demeaning job. “What,” he says, “and leave show business?”

The NFL remains our Greatest Show on Earth, and if you want a piece of the action, today’s entry-level jobs appear to be in the Hype Machine. You might think, now that the schedule release has become another NFL “holiday,”  there’s nothing left with which to attach this much indulgence.

Trust me, someday and probably someday soon, a team will find an entertaining way to hype the bye week, and others will follow. 

By next year, that 17-person marketing staff will likely be 20. Or more.

— Reach Ken Willis at [email protected]