The NFL didn\u2019t choose to open its season on a Wednesday this year so much as it was cornered into it by the law.<\/p>\n
The Rams and 49ers are playing their Week 1 opener in Melbourne, where a Thursday night kickoff in the United States translates to Friday morning local time, and the Sports Broadcasting Act\u2019s longstanding restrictions on Friday broadcasts left the league with no viable path to its traditional Thursday-night slot without running afoul of federal law.<\/p>\n
During NBC\u2019s\u00a0Sunday Night Football\u00a0preview conference call, Awful Announcing asked\u00a0Mike Tirico<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0Cris Collinsworth<\/a> for their read on the experiment\u00a0and whether they expected the league to lean on Wednesday nights again.<\/p>\n \u201cNot the first time a Wednesday has been used for the opening game, but obviously it\u2019s not common,\u201d Tirico said. \u201cI think there is a good cadence for everyone in general. But if the data comes back and the league sees that everyone is interested and is watching on a Wednesday, I would not be surprised to see different days of the week show up going forward. I do think the cadence of Thursday, Sunday, Monday on a regular basis feels right for the fans at home in general. I think the NFL is such an entertainment powerhouse that people will adjust their lives and schedules for the right matchup and the right game.\u201d<\/p>\n The league has bent its calendar to circumstance before, most notably in 2012, when it shifted the Giants-Cowboys<\/a> up a day to sidestep a direct collision with Barack Obama\u2019s acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention.<\/p>\n But despite that precedent, this feels categorically different.<\/p>\n NFL executive vice president of media distribution Hans Schroeder confirmed\u00a0<\/a>in May<\/a> that weekday-night openers are squarely within the league\u2019s long-term plans, tied\u00a0to its Netflix partnership through the 2029-30 season and guaranteeing the streamer a Week 1 game as part of a four-game annual package. By August, however, Schroeder had walked those ambitions back considerably<\/a>, telling reporters the league would deploy Wednesday games \u201cselectively\u201d going forward, reserved for occasions like this year\u2019s Thanksgiving Eve matchup between the Packers and Rams rather than metastasizing into a full-fledged Wednesday Night Football package.<\/p>\n \u201cA rematch of the Super Bowl, a couple of high-profile teams, makes sense,\u201d Tirico continued. \u201cAnd it makes logistical sense to clear out time so they can play Thursday night, which is Friday morning in Melbourne. I think if it works and it continues to work, which I expect it will, thanks in large part to the awareness of the camel commercial that the game is on hump day on Wednesday, that I think it adds possibilities there.\u201d<\/p>\n While Tirico sees Wednesday as a fine option when circumstances call for it, Collinsworth thinks that kind of scheduling flexibility will only matter more as the NFL\u2019s international footprint continues to grow.<\/p>\n \u201cAs the NFL expands their international schedule, which I hope they do more of, I love the idea of playing football around the world,\u201d Collinsworth said. \u201cAnd now with the Olympics, we\u2019re going to get a chance to see flag football, both men and women, from around the world. We\u2019re excited about that too. I think the schedule is going to have to be more flexible as we go along. It really would only be fair to San Francisco and L.A. that if they\u2019re traveling to Australia, that they\u2019re given a little time to come back and readjust for their second game, right? I don\u2019t know all the nuances of how they\u2019re going to do it, but it helps me. The more football I get to watch in one-off games, the less homework I have to do at 7:00 a.m. in the morning. You can put it on every night of the week for me. I\u2019ll be just fine.\u201d<\/p>\n So while there\u2019s no weekly Wednesday package in the works, the NFL will continue to pick spots where Wednesday games make sense. After all, the more standalone games the league can carve out, the more opportunities it has to secure eight-figure audiences, and the more media companies will be willing to pay for broadcast rights.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The NFL didn\u2019t choose to open its season on a Wednesday this year so much as it was…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":880281,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[559],"tags":[64,63,104542,26055,593,369641,85,449708],"class_list":["post-880280","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-nfl","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-cris-collinsworth","tag-mike-tirico","tag-nfl","tag-nfl-on-nbc","tag-sports","tag-wednesday-opener"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/880280","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=880280"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/880280\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/880281"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=880280"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=880280"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=880280"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}