The NFL has been slicing games away from Sunday afternoon in an effort to create more standalone windows. That trend has prompted concerns that, at some point, it will go too far.
There’s a delicate balance to strike. It’s nice to have more occasions to watch one game, and only one game. It’s also nice to have a robust slate of Sunday afternoon games.
On some weekends, the balance will be out of whack. Week 17, for example, has eight standalone contests — Christmas Eve, three on Christmas Day, two the next day, Sunday night, and Monday night. That leaves only eight games for the entirety of Sunday afternoon.
The real question is how many Sunday games are enough for Sunday to still feel like Sunday?
Jason Kelce recently addressed the issue on the New Heights podcast.
“Sunday is the day of football, right?” Kelce said, via Sam Neumann of Awful Announcing. “Outside of going to church in the morning, if you’re still religious and you do that, Sunday is like where so many games happen, and that’s what you grow up, and you gear your entire week around watching football on Sunday.
“It’s an institution at this point, the NFL playing games on Sunday. With every day that we keep adding in there, we’re getting away from that just a little bit. And I worry that the game got big — one of the reasons it got so popular and big was because . . . it was an event. Sunday is the NFL and everybody sets their week apart to tune in to their games that are happening on Sunday, and you’re watching kind of all of them now take place across. I worry that we’re getting away from that just a little bit by building too many of this.”
There’s a certain irony to that comment, given that Kelce’s work with ESPN puts him on the pregame show for one of the games that’s been peeled away from the Sunday slate. And his podcast is distributed by Amazon, which has one of the other games that used to be played on Sundays.
Kelce’s relationships with ESPN and Amazon open the door for the league to gripe, if it so chooses, to his bosses about his opinions regarding the dilution of Sunday football. Not that he should care about that. Because the observation is an obvious one. Sunday is the traditional day for pro football.
But the NFL is now big enough to overcome traditions. The NFL is big enough to make new traditions. And the evolving tradition is this — during football season, any day is Sunday. Every day is Sunday. The audience will be there, whenever and wherever NFL games are played.
Sunday. Monday. Tuesday. Wednesday. Thursday. And, when the limitations of the Sports Broadcasting Act don’t apply, Friday night and Saturday.
But for the provision in the 55-year-old law that allows the NFL to sell its broadcast rights collectively, there would be Friday night games and Saturday games on a regular basis. And high-school and college football would have to deal with it.
Before the NFL started playing games on Thursday nights, college football owned the window. Every week, big games landed on ESPN. Nowadays, there’s a midlevel (at best) college game up against the NFL’s Thursday night game.
The NFL grew up on Sundays. Now that it’s grown to the point that it transcends the weekly calendar, the NFL is no longer bound by that tradition.
Yes, at some point Sunday Ticket and RedZone could go the way of leather helmets. If that happens, the NFL will keep on going.
As Jerry Jones said in March, “When the duck quack, feed ‘em.” The ducks currently prefer getting their meals more often than to having an all-you-can-eat brunch on Sunday at 1:00 p.m. ET.
With no real competition from network TV on Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday night, why not keep the ducks fat and happy from Labor Day through Week 18?
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