The NFL reportedly is looking into adding an annual game on Thanksgiving Eve, and Bomani Jones is worried the league is losing sight of what makes fans love it.
The NFL’s reported interest in the Wednesday national window comes as it looks into how to potentially splice off mini packages of games for streamers. It would be the latest such move for the NFL, which has added more games on Wednesdays, Fridays, and Saturdays for years to create new inventory that doesn’t cut into Fox and CBS’s exclusive rights to Sunday afternoons.
In the latest episode of his podcast The Right Time, Jones warned the league to “protect the sanctity” of Sundays in order to keep fans happy and locked into the habit of watching football.
“What they are diluting is the day Sunday,” Jones said. “What makes y’all’s sh*t so much different than everything else is y’all got this whole day that’s loaded with stuff. And instead, you put a little bit here, you put a little bit there.”
With fewer games on Sundays and fans’ local teams’ schedules more scattered than ever, the value of the weekend goes down.
Jones likened the dilution of Sunday football to MLB de-emphasizing the tradition of Opening Day in favor of overseas series or a national primetime window leading into the first day of games.
Even with more revenue coming in, Jones said, the tradeoff is not always worth it for leagues.
“If I’m the NFL, I get that you can get a little more bread by doing this, but I would be trying to figure out, how do we protect the sanctity of Sunday?” he added. “And to me, that’s not what they’re doing here, unless they’re going to put bums in (the Thanksgiving Eve) game.”
At worst, the constant tinkering with the NFL schedule could also affect players’ health. Forcing players to break their typical routine to satisfy new broadcast partners is a risk, Jones argued.
“I think a mistake, at least a mistake it seems like the NFL is making, but they don’t feel like it matters, (is) a difference between the NBA and the NFL is the NBA is a players’ league. The NFL is not,” he said.
“The NFL is a franchise league; it is a brand league. But the players at some point do matter. And what we’ve seen with the NBA as a result of the changes of style of play, is that the players cannot withstand it. We’re seeing their bodies wear down, and we see less of them, and we complain about it when they try to do things to protect (themselves) or anything else.
“The NFL isn’t a game that allows for no load management … but all these things they’re doing with these games are just making it more and more likely that people get hurt.”
Famously, Patrick Mahomes once came back from an ankle sprain early in order to play in the first NFL Christmas GameDay on Netflix. For the Thanksgiving Eve game, the NFL is reportedly planning to have only teams coming off byes participate.
But the rhythms of the NFL season are ingrained in Americans’ lives. Disrupting that — and jeopardizing players’ health — just to suck up more oxygen on television during the holiday season may prove to be a mistake.