The NFL continues to pursue every possible opportunity to schedule — and sell — game inventory.
According to multiple reports Wednesday, the NFL is looking into scheduling a game on the day before Thanksgiving as soon as this coming season, which would mark a first for the league. The potential addition would expand the league’s Thanksgiving week schedule to at least ten windows across six days.
The league had already expanded its Thanksgiving schedule to include a Black Friday matinee on Prime Video, and commissioner Roger Goodell seemed open to adding a second game on that day in an interview with The Wall Street Journal last year.
Though it is not an actual holiday, and does not carry the cultural relevance of Christmas Eve or New Year’s Eve, the day before Thanksgiving has traditionally produced larger-than-usual audiences for early season NBA and college basketball. But it has never been a day when any league has generated the kind of season-high audiences commonplace on Christmas or Thanksgiving or even Black Friday, which produced last season’s most-watched college football game on ESPN/ABC.
As part of its agreement to sell NFL Network to ESPN, the NFL was able to free up four game windows to sell on the open market. It might stand to reason that a Thanksgiving Eve game would be part of any eventual package, or perhaps even sold standalone. The NFL has a long history of selling rights to individual games and nights, whether the experimental streaming-exclusives of a decade ago, the Christmas Day games on Netflix, or the International Series games from Brazil the past two years.
If the NFL does schedule a game for the day before Thanksgiving, it could be the second Wednesday game of the season. The league is expected to begin its season on Wednesday, September 9, whether with the annual Kickoff Game hosted by defending Super Bowl champion Seattle or an International Series game from Melbourne, Australia, according to reporting by John Ourand of Puck last month.
Wednesday games are unsurprisingly rare in the NFL, as teams would have to skip the preceding Sunday in order to participate on anything approaching sufficient rest. When the NFL scheduled Christmas games the year the holiday fell on a Wednesday, the participating teams played the Saturday before. And the only other Wednesday game in recent history was a season opener, the 2012 Kickoff Game.
Per the reports Wednesday, the league plans to have the participants in any potential Thanksgiving Eve game scheduled for a bye the prior week.
