The NFL has done a U-turn on its promise to avoid games being played on Christmas Day this year, as the league has now announced plans for more festive football after a rise in TV ratings last year thanks in part to Taylor Swift.
With Christmas Day falling on a Wednesday this year, teams that will have played the previous Saturday will be favored to play over others, matching the Sunday-Thursday turnaround, according to the Wall Street Journal’s Andrew Beaton. Two games are scheduled to take place on Dec. 25 this year, The MMQB’s Albert Breer reported.
Hans Schroeder, the NFL’s executive vice president of media distribution, said the league changed its stance after last season’s three Christmas games (Ravens-49ers, Chiefs-Raiders and Giants-Eagles) drew in a large audience. Combined, those games averaged over 28million viewers and each ranked among the top-10 rated regular-season matchups.
‘The fans clearly spoke,’ Schroeder told WSJ. ‘There’s a big demand.’
This year will be the fifth year in a row that the NFL has scheduled Christmas games, and last season was the first time that the league put three games on the holiday when it happened to be on a Monday.
Christmas Day games will return for the 2024 NFL season after Taylor Swift drew up ratings by attending Chiefs-Raiders on Dec. 25 of last year
But, the NFL’s plans for Christmas games won’t be well received by some, especially basketball fans, with the NBA viewing the holiday as one of its biggest day of the year with games scheduled back to back from 12:00 EST to late into the evening. Some of the biggest matchups of the season traditionally take place on Christmas.
That won’t bother the NFL however, as the league attempts to be more in sync with the holidays than it has ever been beforehand. Last year, the league had its first Back Friday game ever on top of its Thanksgiving matchups.
All that being said, Christmas Day games weren’t always necessarily favored by fans throughout the history of the NFL, like in 1971, when the league schedule a couple of playoff matchups on Dec. 25, but faced significant backlash from spectators. That prompted the NFL to redo its scheduling to avoid the holiday entirely until 1989.
Other than NBA action taking place on Christmas, the day is traditionally associated with ‘Home Alone’ re-runs.
Playing on Wednesdays is also a rarity in football, considering that the last time an NFL game took place on the weekday was in 2021 due to a COVID outbreak taking place among the Ravens, causing their Thanksgiving game against the Steelers to be delayed three times and played six days later than its original date. In 2015, the NFL was forced to push back its season-opener to Wednesday to avoid coinciding with the Democratic National Convention. Before that, no NFL game had been played on a Wednesday since 1948.