Despite falling on a Wednesday, Christmas Day will again feature NFL games.
NFL executive Hans Schroeder told the Wall Street Journal in a piece published Tuesday that the league will schedule one or two Christmas Day games this season despite the holiday falling on a Wednesday, a day on which the league has rarely played games. The league will select teams for Christmas who played on the prior Saturday, giving them the same number of days off as if they played Sunday and then on Thursday.
The last Wednesday NFL game was Steelers-Ravens in the COVID-affected 2020 season, a game that was originally scheduled for Thanksgiving night but pushed back repeatedly. The last scheduled Wednesday NFL game was the 2012 Cowboys-Giants season opener, which was moved up from Thursday to avoid then-president Barack Obama’s acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention. (Four years earlier, the NFL took a significant ratings hit when it scheduled its Kickoff Game for the night of John McCain’s RNC acceptance speech.)
This year is the last until 2029 in which Christmas falls outside the traditional NFL week. Christmas will be on a Tuesday that year. Schroeder told the Journal that playing on a Tuesday “might be a bridge too far,” though there is no reason to believe the league will maintain that stance.
Schroeder seemed to rule out the possibility of the NFL scheduling three games for Christmas this season. Traditionally, when the NFL has played one or two Christmas games, they have been scheduled for 4:30 and/or 8 PM ET. Though it was not addressed in the Journal article, expect that to change this time around. In the two years the NFL has scheduled three Christmas games, the 1 PM window has been the most-watched both times.
FOX is contractually guaranteed a Christmas game whenever the NFL plays on the holiday, but the second game — if there is one — would presumably be up for grabs. CBS has aired an afternoon game on Christmas the past two years, while the primetime game has gone to the network with rights to the night (NBC on Sunday night in 2022 and ABC on Monday night last year). As no network has rights to a Wednesday game, the NFL could presumably put a second game on NFL Network, Amazon Prime, or even Peacock — which will miss out on a playoff game this year.
Last year’s three Christmas NFL games averaged 28.68 million viewers, including 29.48 million for Raiders-Chiefs across CBS and Nickelodeon and 29.02 million for Giants-Eagles on FOX, the two largest audiences on the holiday since 1989.
The Wednesday Christmas games are just the latest example of the NFL expanding beyond its traditional Thursday-Monday slate of games. In addition to the new Black Friday game the league added last year, it will play a Friday night game from Brazil in Week 1 of this season.
