The NFL does not care about tradition or holidays
Leagues used to play nice and schedule around each other. Now it's a holiday war for eyeballs
Back in 1971, shortly after the NFL merged with the AFL, two playoff games were played on Christmas day. Fans were outraged that professional football games were played on a holiday reserved for family and religion.
A legislator in Kansas went so far as to threaten a law banning football played on Christmas. A newspaper in Minneapolis printed the home addresses of NFL Commissioner Pete Rozelle and CBS Vice President Bill MacPhail, so upset citizens could direct their anger to the people responsible.
The NFL didn’t schedule a game on Christmas for almost two decades.
If you’re looking for how much sports have taken over American culture, and especially live television, look at the schedule of games today on Christmas: five NBA games and two NFL games. Bay Area sports fans can watch the Raiders in the morning, the Warriors in the afternoon, and the 49ers at night.
This wasn’t even an option in the past. The NFL regular season was originally 14 games and over by Christmas. There’s only a 1-in-7 chance that Christmas lands on a Sunday. When conflicts did arise after the 1971 outrage, the NFL started its season one week earlier, moved all its regular games to Saturday, and/or played playoff games on a Saturday-Monday schedule instead.
Over the last four decades, sports leagues realized that not everybody wants to sit around talking to their families on holidays, or they can’t gather with their families, or they don’t want to be with their families, or watching sports together with their families is a bonding experience … or a way to avoid uncomfortable political conversations.
Just as importantly, the leagues’ TV partners have realized they can get much higher ratings on holidays.
The NFL schedule has increased from 14 regular season games, to 16 games, then a bye for a 17th week, then a 17th game over 18 weeks. The NFL regular season is now so long, the league annually has decisions for Christmas and New Year’s, before the playoffs even begin.
Through all these changes, a certain understanding used to exist amongst the different levels of football:
Friday was for high school
Saturday was for college
Sunday was for the NFL
Monday later was for the NFL too
Thursday then later was for the NFL too
The NBA has played games on Christmas since 1947, but no politician was threatening a ban because they were merely regional games not on TV and the sport didn’t become popular until the 1980s anyway. The NBA on Christmas started to gain cultural impact when Bernard King scored 60 points in 1984. The NBA expanded the games to include its biggest teams and stars in the 2000s and mostly owned Christmas.
The leagues played nice with one another and a mutual understanding existed:
Thanksgiving belonged to the NFL.
Black Friday belonged to a few college football games.
Christmas belonged to the NBA … unless Rocky Balboa was fighting Ivan Drago in Moscow
New Year’s Day belonged to the biggest college football bowl games … and the NHL’s outdoor “Winter Classic”
The NFL, and its television partners, no longer care about these traditions anymore.
The NFL scheduled three games on Thanksgiving and one game on Black Friday. For this Christmas weekend, it’s the usual game on Thursday, two on Saturday since college football is in bowl season, the bulk of its games on Christmas eve, and two afternoon games of storied rivalries on Christmas day. (#SorryNotSorry to the NBA.)
The NFL’s domination over the sports landscape is showing no signs of slowing down, despite what we know about the short-term and long-term impact of concussions and repeated head trauma. A player nearly died last year on national television and this year ratings are higher than ever for the NFL.
Times have certainly changed. In the 1990s and 2000s, the NFL’s Sunday Night Football game (on TNT, then ESPN, then NBC) was moved to Thursday night, or skipped altogether, so it wouldn’t compete against baseball’s World Series.
It changed in 2010, when Major League Baseball started the World Series on a Wednesday, and now baseball lives in constant fear of its most important playoff games getting overshadowed by a terrible midweek NFL matchup.
College football doesn’t care either. The various networks paid millions upon millions for a quantity of games, there’s still only 24 hours in a day on Saturday, and they need content for their cable sports networks. So the student-athletes play games on Thursday, or Friday, and the Mid-American Conference plays games on Tuesday to try getting more eyeballs. (Class? Who cares about more missed classes?)
The former Bowl Championship Series ended the all-day college football feast on New Year’s Day because of “exclusive” windows. Lately, the playoff format has included games going right up to midnight on New Year’s Eve.
I know, there is a very much an “old man yelling at the clouds” vibe to this post. I don’t like it and I suspect most people don’t like it either, especially people who don’t like sports or merely tolerate them occasionally.
Sports fans like tradition. They like knowing when games will be played, on what channel, and not having to divide their focus between their teams and their families.
But this is our new reality. Sports league are beholden to the networks that pay them millions. The networks make decisions based on ratings and the ratings don’t lie. We might complain, but we watch, or enough of us will watch. Or, put more succinctly, more of us will watch these games than anything else that would otherwise be on TV.
This is going to continue, so can someone move a second TV into the living room so we can watch both the Raiders and Warriors when the games overlap?