The NFL says it won’t schedule games on Christmas when December 25 lands on a Tuesday or Wednesday. The 29-percent spike in viewership from Christmas 2022 to Christmas 2023 should prompt the league to change its mind.
If that doesn’t happen, the owners aren’t who we thought they were.
The league presumably has resisted the idea of playing games when Christmas lands on a Tuesday or Wednesday because it creates scheduling issues. Those issues could be easily resolved, however.
Next year, Christmas falls on the Wednesday between Week 16 and Week 17. The easiest way to make three Wednesday games work would be to give the six teams the prior weekend off, making the Wednesday games their Week 17 contests.
They’d play on Sunday, December 15. They’d play again on Wednesday, December 25. They’d finish their regular seasons on Sunday, January 4.
Yes, Week 16 is a late occasion for a bye. (Six teams off also could wreak havoc on fantasy playoffs, not that the NFL would care.) From 1999 through 2001, however, one team had its bye every week of the season, since there were only 31 franchises. Teams had early byes, teams had late byes. And the NFL kept going.
Another possibility would be to have the six teams set to play on December 25 play their Week 16 games on Saturday, December 21. The Saturday-to-Wednesday turnaround is no different than the weekly Sunday-to-Thursday formula. Those six teams would play a tripleheader on Saturday, against a different opponent than the opponent they’ll face the following Wednesday.
There are surely other ways to make it happen. Those are two fairly obvious ways to make it work. It’s unclear from the labor deal whether union consent would be needed to whatever approach the NFL would take.
Then there’s Christmas Eve 2024. Tuesday night. That one is even easier. Week 16 would be extended by a day, and the two teams that play on Tuesday night would play their Week 17 game the following Monday, possibly in a doubleheader that includes the two teams that would play on Monday night, December 23.
Or the league could just expect the two teams that play on Tuesday night to be ready to go the following Sunday.
Here’s the bottom line. It’s not all that hard to drop games on Tuesdays or Wednesdays, if the league really wants to do it. Since the NFL claims as to Thursday games that the injury rate is no higher with four days between games than it is with seven days off — and given that the league now requires some teams to play two short-week games per year — they can easily figure out a way to play three games on Christmas (and one on Christmas Eve) when the holiday lands on a Wednesday. If they want to.
This year’s viewership should make them want to.