The sports calendar ensures that you always know which games are being played in which season. The NFL tries to make each season its own.
After a frenzy of free agency took away much of the limelight of March Madness and college basketball earlier this month, the NFL is doing its best to bully the NBA on the holiest day of the regular season by announcing it will play three games on Christmas Day this year.
“Christmas, when it falls on an NFL game day, we had a lot of success there, with all due respect to our friends in the NBA. It’s something our friends are interested in.” Mike North, the NFL’s vice president of broadcasting, recently revealed. “If Christmas falls on a Sunday, that makes perfect sense.”
This year’s Christmas weekend will be dominated by the NFL — one game on Thursday night December 22, 11 games on Christmas Eve (including one at night), games on CBS, FOX and NBC on Christmas and then Monday night soccer on 26.
This is how you flood the market and suffocate your competition. Roger Goodell is the new Marlo Stanfield.
Adam Silver and the NBA must respond in ways that bring shine back to the Christmas Day games. It won’t be easy, however, considering last year’s much-hyped lineup didn’t live up to expectations. When it was announced that the Christmas Day 2021 league table would feature matchups like Hawks/Knicks, Celtics/Bucks, Warriors/Suns, Nets/Lakers and Mavericks/Jazz, there was enough stardom and drama to keep casual and die-hard fans entertained .
But then injuries messed everything up. Trae Young was injured when the Hawks made their first appearance at Madison Square Garden since wiping out the Knicks in five games in the playoffs. The Warriors were still without Klay Thompson, Luka Dončić was out for the Mavericks and Kyrie Irving, Kevin Durant and Anthony Davis were all absent from the expected Brooklyn-Los Angeles matchup. The Celtics and Bucks game was the only one that featured all of its stars. However, it was scheduled for early afternoon, so it felt like a glorified junior varsity game.
With already three games on Thanksgiving, the NFL is looking to have a second major holiday this year. After last year’s Christmas program with Cleveland/Green Bay and Indianapolis/Arizona, rest assured that the league will ensure that this year’s program is more appealing to a national audience.
It was announced on Monday that Amazon is willing to pay between $70 million and $100 million for a Black Friday game. And when that happens, it’s almost a lock is reported that it would be somewhere between $2.1 million and $3.2 million per team. And given the way this league and these owners love money, you can already pin this game on the schedule.
The NFL’s 2022 schedule will be released in a couple of weeks … right in the middle of the NBA playoffs. Roger Goodell tries to get Adam Silver to bend the knee.
