The NFL is coming for your Christmas dinner, and now they’re willing to come any day of the week. The league announced just yesterday that it intends to play not one but two games on Christmas Day in 2024. And Christmas Day falls on a Wednesday this year, by the way. This might shock you, but the league’s only concern is making as much money as possible and liked the returns it saw last year.
Bah humbug, is the NFL’s message. At least, that’s the message for those who now have to work in order to support their industry. For the average football fan, it’s presumably great to sit back and watch a football game with the family, but what about the families of all the players, coaches, concession stand workers, janitors and everybody else required to work as a necessary part of the infrastructure of putting on an NFL game?
But make no mistake, the NFL is entitled to play games on Christmas Day. Yet they’re doing so on a Wednesday, which means they’re bending over backwards to force the issue. Nothing makes it clearer, though wholly unsurprising, that profit is the only intention. Six years ago I wrote a goodbye to Christmas Day games for a while, having no idea what lay down the road.
To play a Christmas Day game on a Wednesday—make that two games—four teams need to play on the prior Saturday. That gives teams the same timeframe from a Sunday game to a Thursday, which is already the source of complaints. Not that the NFL has ever listened to those complaints.
It’s becoming increasingly hard to conceive of anything the NFL is not willing to do to extract just a little bit more in the way of profits. Now it’s horning in on the territory of the NBA, which has a long-established history of Christmas Day games. It’s also a matter of the league flexing its muscles and testing the waters.
They already forced people to subscribe to a streaming platform to watch a playoff game just months ago. It’s only a matter of time before the Super Bowl becomes a Pay-Per-View game. Probably only as soon as they figure out a way to make it more profitable than the ad revenue.
Meanwhile, they’re shifting the focus of Hard Knocks to put the spotlight on single divisions, rather than teams. You know exactly why they’re doing this, of course. This presumably supersedes any team’s right to refuse to participate on the program, since it’s four teams in one group. Suddenly, they have access to teams, like the Pittsburgh Steelers, who always refused to participate.
As has long been true, the NFL simply holds all the cards. They march forward little by little, but their territory only expands, never recedes. Soon we’ll be seeing 18-game regular seasons, a certainty at this point. And there’s no sense pretending there’s any standing up to them. Viewership isn’t going anywhere, and as long as they have the numbers, they’ll do what they want, when they want.
