Die hard NFL & Pats fan for a few decades now. I’ve always been of the mindset that more football is better than less, so I’ve always welcomed the Saturday games added to the schedule in late December.
But I have to say that today’s Black Friday game fell flat to me. So do the Sunday morning European games. For whatever reason that I haven’t been able to identify, I just don’t get up for them like I do the normal slate. It’s almost like I feel bad for watching them instead of doing normal shit. I’m good to watch the Thursday and Monday night games because the kids are asleep. Sunday afternoon is sort of accepted as time for football. But Friday afternoon and Sunday morning?? I get why the nfl is doing it. They’re wanting to expand viewership in Europe AND more importantly, dominate other time slots for ratings and future tv contracts. I get it but I also really find myself tuning out.
Am I alone on this island or does it feel like the NFL is quasi jumping the shark?
I don’t like it. I love football but I don’t live and die for football, I like watching other sports and I like watching other TV shows. I don’t want the NFL every night of the week, I have a life outside of DraftKings and my fantasy team.
I think in the long term it could eventually hurt the NFL. I think the NFL became a juggernaut because of all the casual fans that other sports couldn’t get. Think of all the people at your work, church, PTA, your neighborhood, who couldn’t name a single NBA player outside of LeBron but somehow are in a fantasy football league every year. I think a huge part of of that is accessibility, if you wanna follow the NFL without being a hardcore fan (whether to follow your local team or to do fantasy football) you have to pay attention on Sunday with the occasional Monday or Thursday throughout the season. The NBA, MLB, and NHL don’t have that, you gotta check in all the time sometimes 3+ times a week (or every night in the case of the MLB) in order to keep up, casual people don’t want that. So by making it a 6 nights a week thing you’re gonna make it harder for those people to follow and over time it will start to push them away from the sport.
But it doesn’t matter. Amazon and Apple own us, they’ll own the NFL and every entertainment option we have. They’re gonna push to own every night of the week using NFL games and they have the money to do it.
There’s literally a court order in place stopping the NFL from doing exactly this, they could only do early Friday because there’s college games on right now, we aren’t getting games 6 nights a week
I think that changes when the 12-team college football playoff system starts. They’re going to want some of those games on Sundays, I can see them making a deal with the NFL to swap Saturday & Sunday timeslots.