The NFL’s first Friday night opening weekend game takes place this evening – but if it was a week later, it wouldn’t be happening at all. By planning for the game just one week before “fall”, NFL made sure they get in a historical Friday game while still respecting the Sports Broadcasting Act 1961.
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Tonight, the Philadelphia Eagles take on the Green Bay Packers in Sao Paulo, Brazil. It’s happening on a Friday night, and as you can imagine, fans across the globe are pretty pumped up about it. However, it easily could’ve gone another way.
As reported by Joe Pompliano, “the Sports Broadcasting Act of 1961 allowed the NFL to pool its TV rights into a single entity instead of needing NFL teams to secure their own deals. It made the TV package more valuable and helped out smaller market teams.”
Though, they were restricted from showing games on Saturdays and Fridays. Those days were reserved for college football and high school football, till the fall. So for years, they did not plan for a Friday game. But this time, they planned a game in the first week of September. The last week before it is officially “fall” and they cannot hold any games.
In terms of the actual regular season, November 2023 was the last time we saw a Friday game when the New York Jets battled the Miami Dolphins. In total, there have only been 12 previous Friday games in the history of the league.
The fall, though, is defined as the second Saturday of September onwards. Therefore, the NFL have managed to beat that deadline by one week. Plus, they’ve managed to hit two birds with one stone by also managing to make it an International Game – which is an honor in its own right for Brazilian fans.
It also features the longest flights for any NFL teams to a game in history, 10 and 11 hours respectively for the two teams involved.
When it comes to Saturday games, however, the NFL has big plans.
NFL Games On Saturday
During the playoffs last season, the National Football League put on Saturday games throughout the course of the post-season. It remains to be seen whether or not that’ll happen again this time around, but we do know as per the league that three of the five designated TBD matchups in Week 17 will be on a Saturday. In Week 18, two more games will be played in the Saturday weekend slot.
In terms of visibility, this is certainly big news for the league. They obviously don’t want to clash with college football earlier on in the year and they’re prohibited from doing so. In equal measure, the second they get an opportunity to strike, they should take it – and they are.
For football fans, we’re used to seeing games go down on a Monday, Thursday and a Sunday. However, when you expand the horizons where possible, it can lead to even more increased viewership figures both in the United States and overseas.
It really does represent how far the NFL has come, and how much further it can still go.
