In a surprise move, the NFL has elected not to flex any games into the Sunday night slot on the final day of the season.
The NFL announced late Sunday that no game will be flexed to Sunday Night Football in Week 17, a sharp departure from previous years, when NBC would always get a game with playoff implications to close out the season.
The league explained its decision by saying it did not want to risk putting a game with no playoff implications on New Year’s Eve, a night when viewers are either out of the home or watching New Year’s specials.
Due to a calendar quirk, New Year’s Eve has only fallen on a Sunday night once since NBC acquired SNF rights — 2006. That year, Bears-Packers had a 7.9 rating and 13.4 million viewers, among the worst-performing NFL games ever on primetime broadcast television.
NBC already had to adjust its NFL schedule to avoid Christmas Eve, airing Sunday Night Football on a Saturday night this past weekend. Its Vikings-Packers game posted a 9.0 overnight rating, tied as the lowest for the SNF package since 2011.
It was not immediately clear how, or whether, the NFL would compensate NBC for losing one of the most precious commodities in all of television — live NFL coverage.
The NFL did move some games around in Week 17. Bengals-Ravens, Bills-Dolphins, Jaguars-Titans, Panthers-Falcons and Saints-Buccaneers will all move from 1:00 to 4:25 PM ET. The full Week 17 schedule is available here.
New Year’s Eve has proven troublesome for sports television, with the College Football Playoff lambasted for scheduling most of its semifinals on the unofficial holiday. After underwhelming ratings for New Year’s Eve semis last year and in 2015, the CFP adjusted its future schedules to mostly avoid the date.
So too has Week 17 been troublesome for the NFL’s primetime packages. Until 2003, ABC’s Monday Night Football languished in Week 17 because it was often saddled with games that had no playoff implications (remember there was no flex scheduling at that point). After MNF hit a then-record low 8.7 rating in Week 17 of the 2002 season, the NFL stopped scheduling Monday night games on the final week of the season.
Flex scheduling was supposed to fix that problem, but apparently not this year.
[News from NFL Communications 12.24]
