Less than four months after saying there wouldn't be any Christmas games scheduled for 2024, the NFL has apparently changed its mind.
CBS Sports lead NFL insider Jonathan Jones has reported that the league is planning to schedule a Christmas doubleheader in 2024, even though the holiday is falling on a Wednesday.
As recently as December, it looked like the NFL was going to skip Christmas in 2024. The league's executive vice president for media distribution, Hans Schroeder, had said that playing on a Tuesday or Wednesday didn't make much sense for the league.
"We're not looking to play football on a Tuesday or Wednesday at this point, especially this late in the year as we get close to the postseason," Schroeder told The Athletic back in December. "We want to focus on the run to the playoffs and for that competitive equity to really shine through. I don't think we're going to look at Tuesday or Wednesday football."
Although we know the doubleheader will be happening, it's still not clear which networks will be showing the games. CBS and Fox have both televised a Christmas game in each of the past two years, but that not might not be the case this year. The NFL is putting the two games up for bid and the bidding is expected to start at about $50 million per game, according to Front Office Sports.
It's not clear how high the bidding will go, but Amazon Prime paid $100 million for the right to stream its Black Friday game last season.
Not only will this bidding involve two Christmas games, but this will involve a day of the week that the NFL almost never plays on.
The league's decision to play a Wednesday game is somewhat surprising, if only because the NFL has generally avoided scheduling games for that day of the week. The two Christmas games will mark just the third season in 75 years that the NFL has played a Wednesday game and just the second time in 75 years that league actually put a Wednesday game on the schedule.
Since 1949, the only scheduled Wednesday game came in 2012 when the Giants played host to the Cowboys in Week 1 to open the season. The opening game of the year is generally played on Thursday, but the NFL moved it to Wednesday to avoid a conflict with the Democratic National Convention.
The only other Wednesday game came in 2020 when a Ravens-Steelers matchup had to be moved to Wednesday due to COVID issues.
The Wednesday doubleheader will mark the first time since 1936 that the NFL has scheduled two games on a Wednesday, according to Pro Football Reference.
Wednesday games are rare and they're going to stay that way, according to NFL commissioner Roger Goodell. At the annual league meeting this week, Goodell said that playing Wednesday football is not something that we'll see very frequently in the future. "It will not be a regular thing," Goodell said, according to Pro Football Talk. "It will be when Christmas falls on a Wednesday."
The NFL scheduled a Christmas tripleheader last year and it was a highly successful day for the league. Not only did the three games average 28.7 million viewers, but all three of them ranked in the top 10 for the most-watched regular-season games in 2023.
If you're wondering how the Wednesday games are going to work from a scheduling standpoint, the NFL already has that planned out: The teams that play on Christmas will play on Saturday in Week 16 (Dec. 21) and then turn around and play the Christmas game in Week 17.
The NFL has been playing regular-season games on Christmas since 1989, but the league didn't start doing it annually until 2020. This will mark the fifth straight year that the NFL has held a Christmas game. Before 2020, the NFL had never gone more than three straight years with a Christmas game.
