The NFL has begun scheduling some games on Wednesdays. For now, “some” will be the operative word.
Via Drew Lerner of Awful Announcing, NFL executive V.P. and chief media officer Hans Schroeder said this week at a Front Office Sports event that Wednesday games are not likely to become the norm.
“We’re going to be selective,” Schroeder said. “I don’t think what you’re going to see is playing Wednesday football throughout the year. But if there’s opportunities to do something creative like we did on Wednesday and Thanksgiving Eve or like Christmas became on those certain days, we’re going to look at it. We’re going to figure out whether we think it’s a smart thing to do. And then we’re going to look at the numbers and make sure that the numbers and the viewership validates what our instincts are.”
While that explanation surely reflects the league’s current thinking on the issue, the league’s thinking about playing on Christmas once included no plan to play on Christmas when December 25 falls on a Tuesday or a Wednesday. Indeed, it was Schroeder who said that.
And then someone crunched the numbers and the owners said, “Do it.”
That could happen with Wednesday night football. If Sunday Ticket is, as YouTube believes it will be, “deconstructed,” the league would have an added incentive to peel more games from the Sunday afternoon cluster and drop them into prime-time windows.
Why not Wednesday night? Why not Tuesday night? The league learned during the pandemic that it’s possible to pull it off, and with the league having no qualms about a Sunday-to-Thursday turnaround, it’s possible to devise a schedule that has teams playing on the non-traditional days of the week.
For Wednesdays, the easiest approach would be to configure the schedule to give the assignment to teams emerging from a bye, or to teams who play on the prior Thursday. Tuesday night games could be the final contests of a given week, with the teams then playing on Sunday or Monday.
In the end, it will all be driven by the desire to make more and more money. And prime-time standalone games make more money than they do when dropped into a Sunday afternoon window with multiple other games.