NASHVILLE — The NFL hasn’t scheduled a game for every day of the week. Yet.
“We’re going to be the new 7-Eleven,” New Orleans Saints defensive end Cameron Jordan said. “NFL, 24 hours, you can watch them play any given day.”
The veteran preparing for his 14th season of professional football has a way of lacing his critiques with playful satire that hits his intended target. With the NFL close to filling every day of the week with a game in the 2024 season, the league with a reputation of “any given Sunday” might just qualify for that new nickname.
It’s all part of the NFL’s plan to keep growing the game and the league.
“Our job is to be everywhere our fans are,” NFL commissioner Roger Goodell said when asked about the league’s new three-year Netflix deal that this year adds Wednesday games. “They have almost 300 million global subscribers. We are obviously focused on becoming more global. So it’s a huge benefit to us.”
That deal is why the league that has scheduled and played games on Christmas for years will be playing not one but two on Dec. 25 this year as the Kansas City Chiefs — the two-time reigning Super Bowl champions — visit the Pittsburgh Steelers as part of a holiday doubleheader capped by the Baltimore Ravens visiting the Houston Texans in a playoff rematch from last season.
The difference is this will be only the third time the NFL has played on a Wednesday since 1950.
The four teams involved all play on Saturday the weekend before Christmas, giving coaches and players the kind of turnaround faced when a Sunday game is followed by a Thursday night kickoff. Tuesday is the only day of the week the Chiefs won’t play a game this season — technically the lone day off for NFL players with Sunday games.
Washington Commanders coach Dan Quinn said the key to preparing is sticking to a routine and shifting days. That involves trying to fool the body clock.
“This would be like a Wednesday, this would be like a Friday, this is what we do before the game, so it’s not as difficult as it seems,” Quinn said. “You have some travel that you have to work in, shorter weeks, longer weeks, but staying true to a process.”
The Ravens will only miss playing a game on a Tuesday and a Friday in a schedule that includes a pair of Thursday games. Christmas will cap a stretch of three games in 11 days for the team.
Baltimore safety Kyle Hamilton said it’s not so much a concern as more of a “shock factor,” but players will adapt and prepare for what may be the start of a new stage for the NFL. He said players likely had the same conversations when the NFL introduced games on Monday nights each week, then Thursday nights.
“I’m sure 10 years from now, that might be the norm,” Hamilton said of an NFL schedule featuring games throughout a week.
Arizona Cardinals offensive lineman Will Hernandez said getting the body to bounce back quickly is tough.
“I just go back to this: We all signed for it. We know what it is. Let’s just go,” Hernandez said.
Monday night used to be for a premier slot for the NFL. A new contract added games on Sunday night.
Then the NFL started opening seasons on Thursday nights in 2006. In 2020, the NFL played its first Tuesday night game since 2010, doing so because of the COVID-19 pandemic. Before that, the NFL hadn’t played on a Tuesday since 1946.
The 2024 schedule released last week opens, as it has for years, on a Thursday night with Baltimore visiting Kansas City.
However, then the Philadelphia Eagles face the Green Bay Packers in Brazil on Friday night — previously seen as a sacrosanct time for high school football. After the Sunday slate, the New York Jets kick off “Monday Night Football” on Sept. 9 against the host San Francisco 49ers.
Thanksgiving long has been a day for the NFL with games in Detroit and Dallas but expanded into the night hours of the Thursday holiday as a tripleheader. And this will be the second straight season the league will compete with stores for attention on Black Friday, with the Las Vegas Raiders visiting Kansas City for anyone not shopping.
Add in the international games, and NFL players’ body clocks and circadian rhythms easily could be thrown off.
Jordan said the league preaches about using Guardian caps on helmets to increase player safety, “but nobody cares about our protocol of how to get our bodies back from a Sunday game to now a Wednesday game? Not saying that sounds absurd.”
Player safety didn’t stop the NFL from increasing the schedule from a 16-game regular season to 17 games in 2021 by cutting a preseason game in the league’s first such expansion since 1978. Now expanding to 18 games at some point in the future is a topic for discussion as Goodell said people “want, obviously, more football.”
The schedule maker has to find a day to slot those games, giving the NFL another chance to fill out the rest of a week where every day looks like just another work day for players.
“If anything, we were going to practice, so why not play?” Jordan said. “And now we can wear our Guardian caps in the game!”