One of the legendary moments in the National Football League came when Philadelphia Eagles fans booed Santa Claus and pelted him with snowballs.
This year, they may get a chance to do it again. An NFL executive has let it slip that the league is planning a Christmas Day tripleheader, since the holiday falls on a Sunday.
The official NFL schedule will be released next month, but NFL VP of broadcasting Mike North appeared on the “SalSports….and Stuff” podcast this week and talked about Christmas plans. .
The NFL tripleheader sets up an interesting battle between football and basketball. The NBA has traditionally dominated Christmas Day programming, running five games from morning to evening.
“We will play on Saturday night on the NFL Network on Christmas Eve and then when we get to Sunday, Christmas Day, we’ll have a tripleheader. We’ll play one game on CBS in the afternoon, one game on Fox in the afternoon and our regular Sunday night game on NBC, “North said on the podcast.”
North said past Christmas Day games have done well, even with the NBA conflict.
“When we can play football on Christmas, it has proven to be something that our fans are interested in. We had Minnesota-New Orleans a couple of years ago. That game did 20 million viewers. We had Cleveland-Green Bay, that game did 30 million viewers. It was followed by Indy-Arizona on the NFL Network, that one performed well. Our fans are telling us — we know they watch on Thanksgiving, they’re happy to watch on Christmas too.”
The NFL has typically moved most of its Christmas Day games to Saturday or Monday. Since a few Sunday games on Christmas Day have done well, the NFL is going for broke and scheduling a tripleheader for this year.
