The Pittsburgh Steelers’ 2024 schedule has been called a lot of things. Chief among them are variations on the word brutal. A big part of that hard stretch surrounds Christmas. The Steelers host the Kansas City Chiefs on Wednesday, Dec. 25 just after traveling to Baltimore to play the Ravens on Saturday, Dec. 21.
The Ravens will also be playing on Christmas Day against the Houston Texans. The Texans play on the previous Saturday as well, facing off against the Chiefs. It’s a unique situation that required a lot of work going into the planning phase. But how did the NFL arrive at this arrangement?
“One thing I’ve learned in being at the league for going on 19 years now, never say never,” NFL Vice President of Broadcasting Onnie Bose said on Wednesday’s episode of the Ross Tucker Podcast. “I think if you thought there was something, probably playing on a Wednesday would be tough, but, look, I think part of it is, go back to 2020 and the COVID year and we learned that we can be pretty resilient and flexible in a lot of things. I think that informs our ethos. And getting to a Wednesday game was challenging, but if you do the math, you can play Sunday to Thursday. Teams do it regularly. So what’s the shift? Play Saturday to Wednesday.”
The NFL’s experience of dealing with COVID-19 played a part in the Steelers playing on Christmas Day in 2024. That’s not something I would have expected to hear. Especially because the shifts and adjustments made during COVID were made out of necessity, not out of any one person’s volition.
So the NFL took lessons learned during a global pandemic that brought life as most people knew it to a screeching halt and applied them to getting the sport on one of the biggest days of the year despite it falling on a day the NFL doesn’t play on. This isn’t the first time the Steelers have played on Christmas Day, but it’s been seven years since they last did.
It’s largely Christmas falling on a Wednesday that made this situation unique. Last year, Christmas fell on a Monday. Christmas was on a Sunday in 2022. Those are normal days the NFL plays on, and subsequently those days had triple-headers.
That would have been even more nightmarish than trying to pull off a doubleheader this upcoming Christmas. As it was, the NFL had to work hard not to give any team an advantage over another.
“You had to find four teams that could be playing each other in some combination,” Bose said. “We called it our Christmas round robin. And so because of that, we had to kind of focus on a division, and they matched up another division, and we got to a place where it’s of couple teams from the AFC North. It’s the Texans and the Chiefs, desirable combinations where Pitt-Baltimore, KC-Houston on Saturday of Week 16, and you come back with KC at Pittsburgh and Baltimore at Houston on Christmas. It felt really exciting.”
The other unique thing about the NFL on Christmas in 2024 is where the games will be shown. Not NBC, not CBS, and not FOX. But for the first time, Netflix will be streaming NFL games live. So not only will the NFL be undertaking an ambitious midweek doubleheader, but it will be doing it with a provider that has never done this before either.
“Kind of a global doubleheader on Netflix for their first foray into live sports,” Bose said. “So, like I said, probably didn’t expect to have games on Netflix this year. Didn’t necessarily expect to be playing on Wednesday, but cool opportunity for us.”
So rather than have one thing change from a normal gameday experience, the NFL opted for two major changes. Thankfully, Netflix won’t have to build a game production from the ground up. CBS Sports will be producing both Christmas Day games for Netflix. So at least there will be something normal about this slate of games.
Regardless of how anyone feels about the Steelers playing a tight schedule around Christmas, the NFL feels like it put in the necessary work and thought into the schedule. Hopefully, the results on the field will bear that out with no one suffering injuries due to the compact schedule.
