Cover 7 | Friday A daily NFL destination that provides in-depth analysis of football’s biggest stories. Each Friday, Richard Deitsch examines some of the biggest storylines in the NFL media world.
“Somehow it would — must, surely, on Christmas Day — come to this. That the longest game in the history of American professional football would be decided by the smallest player on the field.”
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That’s how writer John Underwood of Sports Illustrated elegantly described the conclusion to the NFL’s first-ever Christmas Day set of games. The long day, which featured a pair of divisional playoff tussles on Dec. 25, 1971, ended at 7:24 p.m. Eastern after an epic struggle between the Kansas City Chiefs and Miami Dolphins. That contest lasted an astonishing 82 minutes and 40 seconds of game time before 5-foot-7 kicker Garo Yepremian kicked a 37-yard field goal to lift Miami to a 27-24 win. Sports Illustrated put Yepremian’s kick on the cover with an arresting cover line: “Sudden death at Kansas City: Miami’s Garo Yepremian ends the longest game.”
The NFL also held a game earlier that day — the Dallas Cowboys at the Minnesota Vikings — that technically goes down as the first NFL game on Christmas. But the Miami-Kansas City game is the one that stands the test of time, with Hall of Famers littered across the field as well as the sidelines. The coaches for the game? Don Shula and Hank Stram.
Since Yepremian’s kick sailed through the uprights at Kansas City Municipal Stadium, 25 additional NFL games have been played on Christmas, all during the regular season. The triple-header this year (Las Vegas Raiders at Chiefs, New York Giants at Philadelphia Eagles, and Baltimore Ravens at San Francisco 49ers) marks the fourth straight season the NFL has scheduled games on Christmas Day, its longest streak. It is the second Christmas triple-header in league history, with last year being the first.
Once upon a time, the NBA owned Christmas Day viewership, but the NFL, the Great White Shark of content, has swallowed up viewership. NBA’s five-game Christmas Day schedule last year averaged 4.31 million viewers across Disney-owned ABC and ESPN. The NFL’s three-game set averaged 21.9 million viewers (Green Bay Packers at Dolphins was the highest at 25.9 million viewers). Disney is a partner with the NFL, so you won’t hear ESPN executives complaining; everyone is getting fat. Also, ad buyers will tell you there is room for both given the demos are different. The NFL owns reach; the NBA has a younger audience.
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“The days where families come together across the country we really believe are opportunities for us to use in a way to help build and celebrate football,” NFL executive vice president for media distribution Hans Schroeder said. “So in those years where Christmas falls on a day that we can play NFL games, we think that’s a great opportunity to serve our fans and create a new window that we think they’ll enjoy. I think the number of people who watched shows that they do.”
If you want a big supporter of football on Christmas, look no further than NFL commissioner Roger Goodell. Since the Scheduling Santa took over the top job in 2006, the NFL has played 15 of its 27 all-time Christmas Day games.
NFL's growing Christmas presence
| Decade | Total games | Notes |
|---|---|---|
1970s | 2 | Two divisional playoff games in '71 |
1980s | 1 | 1989 regular-season finale |
1990s | 4 | Regular-season games in '93, '94, '95, '99 |
2000s | 8 | First-ever double-headers in '04, '05, '06 |
2010s | 6 | Double-headers in '16, '17 |
2020-23 | 9 | First triple-headers; four straight years of games |
Some quick NFL Christmas Day history:
— The league played divisional playoff games on Saturday and Monday in 1977 but skipped Sunday, which was Christmas Day that year. Same deal in 1983 and 1988 with the wild-card round.
— They dipped their (mistle)toe back in the Christmas water in 1989 with the final regular-season game, a Monday night on Christmas Day.
— There were five regular-season Christmas Day games total from 1990 to 2003, and the first Christmas double-header came in 2004. We saw doubleheaders in 2005 and 2006 as well as in 2016, 2017 and 2021.
— After this year, the NFL will have had as many Christmas Day games in the past two years as it did between 1972 and 2003.
— In years when Christmas Day fell on regular-season Sundays (1994, 2005, 2011, 2016, 2022), the NFL moved the bulk of its games to the Saturday before.
Schroeder said the NFL is looking for games with national appeal on Christmas. Clubs are asked whether they are interested in playing in the game. There is obviously promotional value given you get a national window to yourself. Professional athletes are used to playing on most holidays, as annoying as that can be. The league will continue to look at triple-headers if the scheduling works.
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“We think the triple-header really works, but we’ll look at that as we go forward, and we will certainly be mindful of the total games we will be playing in that weekend,” Schroeder said.
Looking ahead, Christmas falls in the middle of the week in 2024 (Wednesday), 2029 (Tuesday), 2030 (Wednesday), 2035 (Tuesday) and 2040 (Tuesday). In every other year between now and then, Christmas lands on a day when it will be easy to play games based on the NFL’s typical schedule.
Would the NFL ever consider playing games on Christmas when it falls on a Tuesday or Wednesday? It would take some scheduling gymnastics and accounting for rest and competitive balance. Though theoretically possible, Schroeder shut down that idea.
“We’re not looking to play football on a Tuesday or Wednesday at this point, especially this late in the year as we get close to the postseason,” he said. “We want to focus on the run to the playoffs and for that competitive equity to really shine through. I don’t think we’re going to look at Tuesday or Wednesday football. We’re looking at the days where we’re already playing football and have the opportunity to celebrate something larger on a holiday with a lot of our fans together.”
After the 1971 games, there were small reports of complaints about playing on Christmas Day. League officials have said they reached out to all the clubs regarding fan reaction, attendance and other factors for hosting Christmas Day games. You don’t see much public pushback over the NFL playing on Christmas these days‚ at least via social media, though there was a recent piece in the Deseret News, whose parent company is owned by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, that was titled, “How the NFL Stole Christmas Again.”
One media company that has created a franchise around Christmas football is Paramount/CBS, which owns Nickelodeon. Not only will CBS and Paramount+ be airing the Raiders-Chiefs game, but Nickelodeon will also once again air a kid-geared broadcast (“Nickelodeon NFL Nickmas Game”). Last year, the Los Angeles Rams crushed the Denver Broncos 51-14 on Christmas Day, but the game still averaged 22.6 million viewers on CBS and 906,000 viewers on Nickelodeon. Even more impressive was that the game went up against the NBA’s Milwaukee Bucks-Boston Celtics showdown (6.08 million) on ABC. An executive at a different NFL-airing network, granted anonymity to speak candidly about a competitor, told me that Rams-Broncos viewership number, given the blowout and the day, was the most impressive of the 2022 regular season.
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When ESPN and the NFL do a postmortem on last week’s “Monday Night Football” doubleheader, which featured two games that kicked off at the same time (8:15 p.m.), here’s hoping they conclude not to repeat this specific experiment. Staggered start times are far more beneficial for prime-time viewers — we saw those earlier in the year.
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As for the viewership: The combined audience for both games was 19.8 million viewers. That’s not a bad roll-up number, but each part was underwhelming: The Packers-Giants game drew 11.41 million viewers on ABC; the Tennessee Titans at Dolphins game did 7.301 million viewers on ESPN, and the ManningCast of both games added 940,000 viewers on ESPN2. That’s the lowest viewership total for the ManningCast in 2023. The ManningCast share of the audience against the viewership of the two combined games (9.8 million) was about 9 to 10 percent, which remains a good target for additive programming.
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(Photo of Dolphins fans during last Christmas’ game against the Packers: Kevin Sabitus / Getty Images)
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