NFL games on Christmas
Games held by the National Football League (NFL) on Christmas Day, December 25, are an occasional part of the league's schedule. In contrast to Thanksgiving Day games, however, they are not an annual occurrence, since Thanksgiving is always on a Thursday while Christmas can fall at any day of the week. The NFL held two Divisional Playoff games on Christmas Day in 1971 when the regular season only spanned a 14-week period. This proved unpopular, and the league avoided any more games on Christmas Day until 1989. Since then, the league has played occasional Christmas Day and/or Christmas Eve games in certain years, as part of week 16 or 17 of the regular season.
As of the end of the 2023 season, there have been 30 Christmas Day games in the NFL's history, all broadcast nationally. Two games were played each Christmas Day from 2004 to 2006, 2016 to 2017, and 2021. In 2022 and 2023, three games were scheduled.
The NFL has typically scheduled games on Christmas Day if it falls on a Saturday, Sunday, or Monday. When Christmas Day falls on a Saturday, then it would just be part of the normal slate of the handful of Saturday NFL games held during the final weeks of every regular season. If Christmas Day falls on a Sunday, then the normal slate of Sunday afternoon games is instead played on Saturday, Christmas Eve, and one of the Christmas Day games will include the standard Sunday Night Football telecast. When Christmas Day falls on a Monday, the normal slate of Sunday afternoon games is still played on Christmas Eve, and Monday Night Football on Christmas night, but the Sunday Night Football telecast has been moved to either Monday afternoon or to Saturday, December 23. There have been rare instances of Christmas Day games held on a Friday.
History
Early years
In the earliest days of professional football, the season typically ended near the end of November (marquee games were often played on Thanksgiving) or in the first week of December, depending on the team; exhibition games would then be held in the winter. Once league schedules were standardized in the 1930s, the NFL Championship Game was typically held in mid-December. The 1943 NFL Championship Game, played on December 26 of that year because of scheduling complications brought on by World War II, was the first regulation NFL game to be played on or after Christmas.
From 1943 until the 1970 AFL-NFL Merger, the NFL regular season usually ended in mid-December, with the NFL Championship Game being held on the Sunday two weeks later. If that Sunday fell on Christmas Day December 25, the league preferred to move it to the following day, Monday, December 26; this rescheduling occurred for both the 1955 and the 1960 championship games.
The American Football League (AFL) compensated differently: the 1960 championship game was moved back by a full week, being played on New Year's Day 1961, with Christmas Sunday being an off-week. (The NFL's 1966 championship game was also held on Sunday, January 1, 1967, two weeks after the end of the regular season.) New Year's Day was an available day since the college bowl games are moved back to Monday, January 2 in years in which January 1 falls on a Sunday. The AFL had scheduled the 1966 championship game for Monday afternoon December 26, but when the two leagues agreed to merge in 1970 and play a "World Championship game" starting with the 1966 season, the AFL game was moved back to Sunday, January 1.
1971 Divisional Playoffs
The first NFL games actually played on December 25 came after the merger, during the 1971–72 NFL playoffs. The first two games of the Divisional Playoff Round were held on Christmas Day; the first of these was between the Dallas Cowboys and the Minnesota Vikings, while the second of the two contests played that afternoon, the Miami Dolphins versus the Kansas City Chiefs, wound up being the longest game in NFL history.[1] Because of the length of the latter game, the NFL received numerous complaints, reportedly due to the fact that it caused havoc with Christmas dinners around the nation. The league also came under fire from some quarters for intruding on a traditional religious and family holiday, and a Kansas state legislator proposed a bill to ban the scheduling of future games on December 25.[2][3] As a result, the NFL decided to not schedule any Christmas Day games for the next 17 seasons.
Avoiding Christmas
This required considerable effort during those years in which Christmas Day fell on a Saturday or a Sunday, given that ordinarily those days would be days in which NFL playoff games were to be held.
In 1976, the NFL opened its regular season a week earlier than would have ordinarily been the case (September 12, the second Sunday of the month, rather than the customary third Sunday) so that the Divisional Playoffs could be held on December 18 and 19 instead of December 25 and 26, and thus no games would be needed on Saturday, December 25 (Super Bowl XI was subsequently played on January 9, the earliest date in Super Bowl history).
In 1977, with Christmas Day falling on a Sunday, the Divisional Playoff Games were held around the holiday, with an AFC doubleheader on Saturday, December 24, and an NFC doubleheader on Monday, December 26. This was done so that one team did not have a two-day rest advantage over the other for the Conference Championship games (the NFL only allowed one-day rest advantages). This scheduling resulted in most of the country missing the majority of the first quarter of the Pittsburgh Steelers–Denver Broncos game telecast (beginning at 4:00 p.m. EST), since the early AFC game that Saturday (Oakland Raiders–Baltimore Colts, beginning at 12:30 p.m. EST) went into double overtime; with an ordinary schedule of one game from each conference, viewers would have had the option of switching channels (or using a VCR) but in this case NBC simply stayed with the Raiders–Colts game (except in the Pittsburgh and Denver markets) and had to overlap its telecasts.
The NFL continued to avoid Christmas Day even after it started to extend the length of the regular season and the playoffs. The league expanded to a 16-game regular season and a 10-team playoff tournament in 1978, but it was not until 1982 that the regular season ended after Christmas Day. It was originally scheduled to end on Sunday, December 26 of that year, but the regular season was extended to Sunday, January 2, 1983 after the 57-day NFL players' strike reduced the season from 16 games to 9; the NFL compensated by extending the regular season one week and eliminating the off week between the conference championships and the Super Bowl.
In 1983 and again in 1988, the NFL split the first round Wild Card Playoffs between Saturday, December 24 and Monday, December 26 to avoid a Christmas Day game.
Had the United States Football League (USFL) survived to play its autumn 1986 season, it would have featured the first major professional football games to be played in the regular season on Christmas Day; the USFL planned a complete set of four games for Christmas Day.[4] The USFL suspended operations prior to the 1986 season and the games were never played.
Regular season games on Christmas
Finally, in 1989, the NFL tried another Christmas Day game, Cincinnati at Minnesota, but it was a 9:00 p.m. EST Monday Night Football contest on ABC, thereby avoiding interfering with family dinners. The NFL pushed the regular season back one week in 1989 as a one-off experiment, meaning Christmas Day would fall during the last week of the regular season instead of the first round of the playoffs. The league added a bye week to its schedule in 1990, making Christmas Day permanently fall during the regular season. In the years since, the NFL has played an occasional late-afternoon or night game on the holiday, but the league did not schedule a Christmas Day game starting earlier than 3:30 p.m. EST (for either participating team) from 1971 through 2021.
The league has generally played one or two games on Christmas Day when the holiday falls on a Saturday, Sunday, or Monday. If Christmas Day falls on a Saturday, then it would just be part of the normal slate of the handful of Saturday games during the final weeks of the regular season. Since 1994, if Christmas Day falls on a Sunday, then most of the usual Sunday afternoon games are instead played on Saturday, Christmas Eve. The league also played rare Friday games on Christmas Day in 2009 and 2020, both of which were considered special editions of Thursday Night Football.[5][6]
With December 25 again falling on a Sunday in 2022, the NFL scheduled three Christmas Day games for the first time, which consisted of single games for each Sunday network -- Fox at the traditional 1:00 p.m. ET early slot, CBS in the late game slot, which was moved back five minutes from the usual doubleheader slot to 4:30 p.m. ET, and Sunday Night Football.[7][8] The CBS game included an alternate, youth-oriented broadcast on sister network Nickelodeon, after having previously aired Wild Card games in such a manner.[9]
Under the NFL's next round of television deals reached in March 2021, which began in 2023 and will run through 2033, Fox acquired the rights to air special Christmas Day games as the schedule permits. These special Christmas Day games are in addition to standard primetime games on Christmas Day (such as Sunday Night Football and Monday Night Football in years in which Christmas Day lands on those days).[10] With December 25 landing on a Monday in 2023, the league scheduled another tripleheader, once again consisting of national CBS and Fox games, along with Monday Night Football.[11] For the second consecutive season, Nickelodeon aired an alternate, youth-oriented broadcast of CBS's game.[12]
With December 25 landing on a Wednesday in 2024, the league told The Wall Street Journal in December 2023 that it will not play games when Christmas Day falls on Tuesdays or Wednesdays.[13][14]
