Is retreating from New Year's Day the right move for the Winter Classic?

For the first time in its relatively brief history, the NHL Winter Classic has retreated away from New Year’s Day. The game has been played before on January 2, but only in years when that date was functionally “New Year’s Day” and featured the usual slate of bowl games associated with the holiday. This year, it moves to New Year’s Eve, punting on a head-to-head with a New Year’s Day bowl line-up that consists of three-straight College Football Playoff quarterfinals.

Football competition is a conundrum for all leagues. For the likes of the WNBA and NASCAR, which end in the fall, it means fewer viewers for the playoffs than for the regular season. For events like the NHL and NBA, which begin in the fall, it means that it takes until mid-February before one can begin to attract sports fans’ relatively undivided attention. Exceptions to that are holidays like Christmas and New Years, on which those leagues have played some of their highest-profile games. For the NBA, that has been its Christmas Day slate, which since 2008 has consisted of five games. For the NHL, that has been its annual Winter Classic, which since 2008 has been a staple of New Year’s Day.

Much has been made of the NFL stealing Christmas, but the holiday still produces the top NBA audiences of a given season. (The last season in which a Christmas game did not top the charts was 2001-02.) This year, with Christmas viewership up a whopping 87 percent from last year’s low, the holiday delivered the five largest audiences of the season. While the NFL’s margin of victory over the NBA was yet more fodder for the league’s many detractors, the Christmas audience nearly wiped out the double-digit decline in viewership the NBA experienced to start the season.

For the NHL, which is itself down double-digits, the Winter Classic had long been the most-watched game of a season — but that has changed with the game’s move from broadcast network NBC to cable’s TNT Sports. Last season’s audience of 1.1 million viewers did not even crack the top five, ranking seventh for the season behind five ABC windows and Connor Bedard’s career debut.

Last season’s record-low audience could be attributed to several factors, including the mediocrity of the host team (Seattle), a matchup of two relatively new franchises in a game that is usually steeped in some history, and a West Coast-necessitated 3 PM ET start time that put the game in direct competition with the Rose Bowl. (In the NBC days, the Winter Classic almost always started at 1 PM ET to avoid the Rose Bowl.) It also bears noting that simply airing exclusively on cable puts a cap on how many viewers one can realistically expect, especially in the current television environment.

Thus, there are some easy solutions. This year’s Blues-Blackhawks matchup fails on the team quality measure (St. Louis is mediocre and Chicago flat out bad this season), but still pairs historic rivals in a historic setting — and given the Midwest locale, could easily be scheduled for an early New Year’s Day window. TNT contractually has rights to the Winter Classic, but already under this media rights deal has swapped rights to the Stadium Series for the “Thanksgiving Showcase” that had been earmarked for ABC. With ABC not set to simulcast any of the New Year’s Day bowl games, there is a potential opening for another swap. As compensation, the league could grant TNT first pick of a conference final in years when it airs the Stanley Cup Final (albeit there is only one more of those after this season), or shift Opening Night to TNT from ESPN. There are options.

Yet instead of those changes, the NHL moved the Winter Classic back a day to New Year’s Eve, away from College Football Playoff competition. The move does not even grant the Winter Classic a standalone window, as there are still competing football games (albeit not playoff-level), not to mention a full schedule of 12 other NHL games — including one (Montreal-Vegas) that will overlap with the start.

The move makes some sense, as under the expanded playoff format, all three of the New Year’s Day bowl games will be quarterfinals and thus attract a bigger audience than the non-playoff bowls of old. Last year, there were three 1 PM ET New Year’s Day bowl games that averaged a combined 16.1 million viewers across ABC, ESPN and ESPN2. Given the performance of New Year’s Day semifinals in past playoffs, it is reasonable to expect that most playoff quarterfinals could top that figure.

In the face of increased football competition — a common issue in an era of expansion for the pro and college game — backing down is often a good idea. The PGA Tour and IndyCar have adjusted their schedules to minimize, or entirely avoid, the NFL season. The WNBA has for years been advised (including by this writer) to end its season by Labor Day weekend, as had been the practice in the early days of the league.

For a league like the NHL, the key question is whether retreating to New Year’s Eve is really a better option than simply maximizing one’s viewership on New Year’s Day. In the out-of-home era, holidays like Christmas, New Year’s and even Easter are more than big enough to accommodate multiple sports. New Year’s Eve, on the other hand, has long been viewed as a ratings drag — and it is not clear anything has changed on that front in the out-of-home era.

Given the choice between New Year’s Eve on cable and New Year’s Day on any platform, even football competition is not a compelling enough reason to punt. For the NHL, it seems unlikely that the move will have the desired effect.