There was a time when most NFL games took place on Sundays with one on Monday and a few sprinkled on Saturdays late in the season. That changed when the league added Thursday Night Football in 2006 and it’s expanded further since.
These days you might see a double-header on Monday nights while the league continues to consider ways to flex schedules to create more meaningful match-ups during the week. We’ll have a Friday NFL game this season and every so often something happens to necessitate a Tuesday night game as well. And just after adding a 17th game to the regular season, it feels like only a matter of time before the league tries to add an 18th. And so on.
As the NFL also adds more broadcasting partners and new technology drives innovation, some have wondered if we might see the league continue its domination of the TV landscape by eventually adding games to other nights.
ProFootballTalk’s Mike Florio seems convinced that it’s less a question of “if” and more about “when?”
“I think sooner than later we’re gonna have Tuesday Night Football, we’re gonna have Wednesday Night Football,” said Florio on Wednesday during an appearance on The Pat McAfee Show. “It’s gonna be hopefully in my lifetime a seven-day-a-week, primetime event. There’s too much money to be made.”
"I think sooner than later we're gonna have NFL football seven days a week because there's too much money to be made"@ProFootballTalk #PMSLive pic.twitter.com/UyGxnmDidD
— Pat McAfee (@PatMcAfeeShow) March 29, 2023
When McAfee asked if that’s what Florio would really want, to which he said he’d appreciate not having to try to watch so many games on Sunday.
“Every Sunday, during football season, I’m in a viewing room at NBC trying to watch nine games at once. And when I get a chance to just watch one game I learn so much more. I understand so much more. So I would love to have football on every night of the week. It would be nice to have a night or two off. Like Friday night and Saturday would be nice, but I’d be fine with Tuesday and Wednesday.”
McAfee, a former punter, noted that current players are already frustrated with the length of the season and if more games were added it would likely mean that they would miss some of them either due to injuries or because of load management-style conservation. That, in turn, is likely to make fans mad when they pay top dollar to attend an NFL game while their favorite players are resting because they just played four days ago and have another game to play five days from now.
A seven-day-a-week NFL schedule certainly sounds like a terrible idea on paper, but that’s rarely stopped NFL owners from making changes that could net them some more money.
[The Pat McAfee Show, Barrett Sports Media]
