NFL to play Christmas doubleheader despite holiday falling on Wednesday

Although the holiday falls on a Wednesday this year, the NFL plans on playing on Christmas Day in 2024, marking a reversal in course from the league’s previous stance.

The NFL announced Wednesday that it will hold a doubleheader that afternoon.

‘We’ve seen really some unprecedented growth,’ NFL executive vice president of media distribution Hans Schroeder said in a news conference.

There are several scheduling considerations that will go into the matchup. The teams participating will play the previous Saturday. The NFL schedule will be fully released in May, although each team knows its home and away opponents for the upcoming season.

The move is an about-face from the league’s previous stance that it did not plan to play games on Christmas when the holiday fell on a Tuesday or Wednesday, a point that NFL vice president of broadcasting Mike North restated after last year’s schedule release.

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Last year, the NFL scheduled three standalone games on Christmas Day, which fell on a Monday. The late-afternoon slot between the Philadelphia Eagles and New York Giants gave Fox an average of 29 million viewers, its highest-rated Christmas Day telecast of any kind. That night, on ESPN, the Baltimore Ravens defeated the San Francisco 49ers with similar viewership and was the second most-watched ‘Monday Night Football’ contest in 27 years.

The NBA typically had a monopoly on Christmas Day sports programming, but the NFL and its ratings juggernaut has infiltrated the space over the years.