The NFL Is Planning Its First-Ever Christmas Day Triple-Header
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If you like huddling around the TV with family to watch football on a holiday/fall into a tryptophan-induced coma, Christmas has come early for you this year.
NFL VP of Broadcasting Mike North, as a guest on this week’s SalSports… and Stuff podcast, revealed a plan to this year tackle the league’s first-ever Christmas Day triple-header, on Sunday, Dec. 25.
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With Christmas falling on a Sunday this year, most of that week’s slate will be played on Saturday, Dec. 24, North said — with Christmas Eve games falling in the usual 1 o’clock, 4 o’clock and nighttime windows.
“And then when we get to Sunday, Christmas Day, we’ll have a triple-header,” North revealed. “We’ll play one game on CBS in the afternoon, one game on Fox in the afternoon, and our regular Sunday night game on NBC.”
Christmas Day is typically the domain of NBA games — as CBS Sports notes, the NFL didn’t play its first regular season game on Christmas until 1989, and it didn’t play its first Sunday Christmas game until 1994. But North said that an appetite for holiday viewing very much exists.
“Christmas, when it falls on an NFL game day, we’ve had a lot of success there — with all due respect to our friends in the NBA,” he said. (One example he cited was last year’s Browns/Packers game, which with nearly 30 million viewers was the third-most watched regular-season game of 2021.) “Our fans are telling us, we know they watch on Thanksgiving, they’re happy to watch on Christmas, too.”
This year’s NFL schedule, Christmas Day matchups included, will be announced on May 12.
What do you say? Are you ready for some a lotta football this Christmas Day?
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