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Wednesday football is coming to the NFL next season.
The NFL will play two more Christmas Day games in 2024, the league announced, despite the holiday falling on a Wednesday this year.
Matchups and broadcast details for the games have yet to be determined. The four teams featured in the games will play the previous Saturday in order to have recovery time comparable to a short-week post-Sunday turnaround for the league’s weekly Thursday night games.
The NFL has gotten more aggressive on scheduling games Christmas Day, with eight total contests on Dec. 25 over the past three seasons — though that coincided with the holiday falling on a Saturday in 2021, Sunday in 2022 and Monday in 2023. The results have been astounding, including stellar ratings for all three Christmas Day games last year.
The middle window of those games, an NFC East matchup between the division rivals Philadelphia Eagles and New York Giants, averaged just over 29 million viewers on FOX. It was the network’s most-watched Christmas Day programming of any kind.
The NFL, though, has rarely played Wednesday games, though several exceptions were made during the 2020 and 2021 seasons as the COVID-19 pandemic forced schedule-makers to adjust amid outbreaks of the virus.
Commissioner Roger Goodell said Tuesday after the Christmas announcement that Wednesday games will not be a regular occurrence for the league, and he does not expect there to be injury issues, citing the lack of uptick in injuries as the league phased in Thursday Night Football as a reason for optimism.
“I think we have this down,” Goodell said, via ESPN.
The NFL will also play two Friday night games next season — a Black Friday game as part of Amazon Prime’s Thursday Night Football package and a Week 1 game in Brazil featuring the Eagles facing off against either the Green Bay Packers or Cleveland Browns.
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Publish date : 2024-03-26 23:34:16
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