I don’t want to say I told you so, but I did not long ago when I said the NFL would soon broadcast games on television seven days a week. 

It had long since been routine for the NFL to air games four days a week throughout the regular season–Thursday, Saturday, Sunday and Monday–and the league took things a step further in 2023 when it streamed its first-ever Black Friday contest on Amazon Prime the day after Thanksgiving.

The NFL will show at least one game on Friday again in 2024 when it follows up its traditional Thursday Night Kickoff Classic on September 5 with a contest in Brazil the very next day.

Once you start broadcasting games on five different days throughout the regular season, you might as well throw in a sixth, right?

What are you doing on Christmas this year? Are you going to spend time with your family? Are you going to watch the NBA’s annual slate of games? The NFL is betting on you sitting around and watching football. “But Christmas is on Wednesday this year!” you might be exclaiming. The NFL doesn’t care.

The NFL announced this week that it will broadcast a doubleheader on Wednesday, December 25, 2024. The league has only held two games on a Wednesday since 1948 (2012 and 2020), and that day of the week was forever considered to be off-limits in terms of scheduling.

Not anymore.

Why? Ratings, that’s why.

“When we saw the viewership from this past year, really our fans spoke. We certainly saw and believe that they are very much enjoying and wanting NFL football on Christmas,” said Hans Schroeder, the NFL’s executive vice president of media distribution, while speaking with reporters on Tuesday. “So what we’re going to do is we’re going to play a couple of games, like we’ve typically played for well over a decade, probably more than that, on Saturday of Week 16, and then come back and play a couple of games on Christmas Day on Wednesday.”

To Schroeder’s point about viewership, the NFL’s 2023 Christmas tripleheader averaged over 28 million viewers over three games. That’s a lot of eyeballs for networks that have lost a ton of them in recent years when it comes to their scripted and reality shows.

What’s the most talked about network show these days? Probably ABC’s hilarious mockumentary, Abbott Elementary. Its Season 3 premiere in February drew nearly six million viewers over multiple platforms–including ABC and Hulu.

Those kinds of numbers would have gotten a show canceled as recently as a decade ago. But six million viewers is considered a massive win in 2024.

The NFL sees this. The networks feel this, and that’s why you need to prepare yourself for Wednesday Night Football–maybe even on ABC in place of Abbott Elementary. 

Why mess around with six million viewers for a scripted show in the middle of the week when you can attract double figures with a primetime football game? Amazon averaged nearly 12 million viewers for its Thursday Night Football package in 2023–or 24 percent more than it did the year before–its inaugural season.

And that’s a streaming service. Imagine what an over-the-air network or even a cable network could do in terms of ratings.

It’s not hard to imagine.

For his part, Roger Goodell tried to assure everyone that Wednesday football was a one-time thing due to Christmas falling on that day this year:

“Well, I think the days are the same for us. We’ve done this,” said Goodell courtesy of NFL.com. “In fact, COVID was a learning opportunity, I think it was the first time we played on a Wednesday. It will not be a regular thing. It will be when Christmas falls on a Wednesday. But the time period between games has been done before. We have not seen any elevation of injuries. You all, and we, have had a major focus on Thursday night when we first put it in, and we’ve still not seen any kind of elevation of injuries. So I think we have this down.”

Yeah, the commish said that Wednesday games will not be a regular thing, but he also referenced the lack of injuries when playing games on Thursday–or on three days’ rest.

If you reference back to Schroeder’s quote, he mentioned that teams playing on Wednesday in Week 17 will be doing so after playing on Saturday in Week 16.

That’s three days’ rest, my friend.

What did I tell you in a previous article? I told you that the NFL would find creative ways to make football work seven days a week.

If you don’t think WNF is a major possibility in the not-so-distant future, you better think again.

How about TueNF?

That’s crazy, right? If you can play on a Sunday after you suited up the previous Monday, why can’t you play on a Tuesday after you suited up the previous Wednesday?

What’s the difference? Surely, there would be no increase (or elevation) of injuries, right?

You’ve heard of the metaphor involving the frog and the pot of boiling water, haven’t you?

Six days down, only Tuesday to go.