{"id":367483,"date":"2025-12-23T21:34:16","date_gmt":"2025-12-23T21:34:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/367483\/"},"modified":"2025-12-23T21:34:16","modified_gmt":"2025-12-23T21:34:16","slug":"how-the-nfl-grinch-stole-the-nbas-christmas","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/367483\/","title":{"rendered":"How the NFL Grinch Stole the NBA’s Christmas"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>You\u2019re a foul one, Mr. Goodell!<\/p>\n

(Programming Note: We\u2019ll be taking tomorrow and Thursday off from posting for Christmas \u2014 don\u2019t worry, the models and stats will still update<\/a> \u2014 so here\u2019s wishing you and yours a happy and safe holiday! \ud83c\udf84\u2764\ufe0f)<\/p>\n

Like many of you reading this, I suspect, I grew up with a pretty clear idea of which sports \u201cowned\u201d which parts of the calendar.<\/p>\n

College football had New Year\u2019s Day covered<\/a>, with perhaps a little room carved out for hockey and the Winter Classic<\/a>. Memorial Day weekend was all about auto racing<\/a>. The Fourth of July belonged to baseball, as did Mother\u2019s Day and Father\u2019s Day (break out the pink bats<\/a> and blue accoutrements<\/a>) and Labor Day, too \u2014 when the final-month playoff push truly sets in. Thanksgiving was all about watching NFL games while eating turkey<\/a>, and Christmas was NBA territory since at least when Bernard King dropped 60 in the Garden<\/a> on December 25, 1984:<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

But times change, and old traditions are torn down in favor of new ones. And perhaps nowhere is that more apparent than in the NFL\u2019s recent takeover of Christmas Day<\/a> from the NBA, starting in 2020 and continuing into Thursday\u2019s slate<\/a>, which features Cowboys-Commanders and Lions-Vikings on Netflix and Broncos-Chiefs in the nightcap on Prime Video.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s not fair to say the NFL never had a presence on Christmas at all until recently. The league occasionally played games<\/a> on December 25 when the holiday conveniently aligned with its usual weekend windows \u2014 including a controversial pair of playoff games in 1971<\/a> and sporadic regular-season contests, always in the late afternoon or evening, starting in 1989. But those appearances were rare, restrained and clearly treated as exceptions to the general rule of no NFL games on Christmas, rather than as a challenge to the NBA\u2019s traditional holiday showcase.<\/p>\n

However, the NBA itself began turning Christmas into more and more of a TV event, scheduling FIVE games per year on the holiday starting in 2008, rather than the usual two or three. What used to feel like a curated hoops event slowly became a full-day basketball marathon, stretching from late morning deep into the night. While that expansion made Christmas bigger for the league in the short-term, it diluted the sense that any single game was the must-watch matchup. In the process, it also made the day look less like sacred territory and more like an overwrought block of television programming \u2014 ripe for competition.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

And so, after averaging fewer than 0.5 Christmas Day games per year from the 1980s through the 2010s, the NFL barged into the holiday for good with the Vikings and Saints in the COVID season of 2020. That game did so well \u2014 scoring more than 20 million viewers<\/a> across FOX and the NFL Network \u2014 that the league expanded to two games in 2021 and three in 2022. <\/p>\n

Those games, in turn, shattered records<\/a> \u2014 Packers-Browns in 2021 garnered 28.59 million viewers, making it the most-watched Christmas Day sporting event in at least two decades at the time. And then came 2023<\/a>, when the Chiefs and Raiders broke that record with 29.2 million viewers. Even after a dip with the switch to streaming-platform exclusivity last year, Chiefs-Steelers and Ravens-Texans collectively averaged 24.2 million viewers.<\/p>\n

By contrast, the NBA has pulled in less than 20 percent of the NFL\u2019s viewership numbers since the head-to-head began 5 years ago, with no individual NBA game scoring higher than 7.76 million viewers<\/a> for LeBron James\u2019 Lakers versus Steph Curry\u2019s Warriors last year. After the game, James said<\/a>, \u201cI love the NFL, but Christmas is our day.\u201d But unfortunately, the ratings numbers tell a different story:<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

As Jon Lewis of SportsMediaWatch pointed out here<\/a>, the NFL\u2019s dominance over the NBA in Christmas Day ratings isn\u2019t exactly a new phenomenon to the past few seasons. Even historically, every time football has played games on December 25 alongside basketball<\/a>, the NFL has won the head-to-head viewership battle \u2014 often by overwhelming margins. The league has never lost a Christmas Day ratings battle in the aggregate, and only twice \u2014 in 2009 and 2010, both games featuring James versus Kobe Bryant \u2014 did the most-watched NBA game surpass the most-watched NFL contest of the day.<\/p>\n

So maybe the real question is why the NFL didn\u2019t try to steal Christmas from the NBA sooner?<\/p>\n

The answer appears to be a mix of restraint and incentive. For decades, another holiday stage simply wasn\u2019t worth the effort for a league that already owned Sundays, Thanksgiving and the January-February postseason spotlight, especially when the NBA\u2019s showcase games were still capable of producing some level of marquee audience numbers. But once those NBA peaks began to slip \u2014 and once Nielsen\u2019s inclusion of out-of-home viewing in 2020<\/a> suddenly supercharged football\u2019s already enormous numbers \u2014 the NFL\u2019s calculus changed. Christmas went from a courtesy the NFL could afford extending to a fellow league, to a ratings bonanza it could no longer justify passing up.<\/p>\n

And so now, the modern sports fan is left to split Christmas between football and basketball like a child of divorced parents awkwardly sharing custody \u2014 with one party deciding the old arrangements no longer hold anymore.<\/p>\n

Perhaps the NHL has the best idea: Simply getting out of the bigger sports\u2019 way. The league has long gone on a holiday break<\/a> for Christmas Eve and Christmas Day \u2014 even trades are prohibited<\/a> around the holiday \u2014 and in recent years, the league has trended toward fewer games on both December 23 (though there are plenty<\/a> tonight) and December 26, with more games loaded onto the 27th:<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

But the NBA doesn\u2019t have the luxury of ceding its own signature holiday away to the NFL, even if the latter is an unbeatable ratings machine. This week\u2019s slate of holiday football games<\/a> are about as meaningless as it gets \u2014 five of the six teams involved are either eliminated from playoff contention or have very low odds<\/a> \u2014 so maybe the NBA\u2019s showcase games<\/a> can give us a better show anyway. But whatever the outcome, there\u2019s no doubt anymore that the old rules of the sports calendar, and the deference they once implied, now belong to holidays past.<\/p>\n

Filed under: NBA<\/a>, NFL<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"You\u2019re a foul one, Mr. Goodell! (Programming Note: We\u2019ll be taking tomorrow and Thursday off from posting for…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":367484,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[559],"tags":[64,63,593,85],"class_list":{"0":"post-367483","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-nfl","8":"tag-au","9":"tag-australia","10":"tag-nfl","11":"tag-sports"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/367483","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=367483"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/367483\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/367484"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=367483"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=367483"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=367483"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}