A 1960s legal loophole enabled Friday's Eagles-Packers showdown

We can thank the calendar gods for five straight nights of football

Welcome to Club Sportico! Thanks for joining—please do reply with any critiques/comments/compliments! Jacob leads off this week…

Quick: When was the last time the Philadelphia Eagles played on a Friday?

It was actually also the first time they faced the Dallas Cowboys, back on September 30, 1960.¹ The Cowboys were an expansion team, relegated to play on that Friday because the AFL’s Dallas Texans had booked the Cotton Bowl for the season’s first three Sundays.

Cowboys founder Clint Murchison Jr. tried to woo nearby Texas State Fair goers, offering five free tickets for kids with other stubs sold. It didn’t really work. Fewer than 20,000 people showed, about half as many who would watch the Texans two days later (and even fewer than attended Texas-Texas Tech in between). A single camera captured the action from the press box. The game wasn’t even televised in Philly.²

This Friday, when the Eagles face the Green Bay Packers in São Paulo’s Arena Corinthians, the scene will be a little different. The Eagles once again enter foreign territory, but this time fans are flying 5,000 miles to attend. Tickets available online sold out in two hours. And many, many cameras will be used to air the game around the world.

The NFL has grown so much over seven decades in large part because of a bill John F. Kennedy signed into law exactly one year (to the day!) after that Eagles-Cowboys contest—The Sports Broadcasting Act of 1961. That law is also why Friday matchups have become so rare in the interim.

The legislation allowed the NFL (and other major leagues) to merge every team’s broadcasting rights and sell them together to TV networks like NBC and CBS. But at the same time Congress, thanks in part to NCAA-led lobbying efforts, accounted for the damage a unified NFL behemoth could do to high school and college football.

So, the US government essentially carved up the weekend: Friday for high school, Saturday for college, Sunday for the pros.

Recently, though, leagues have found ways to blur the lines. Technically the NFL’s prohibition on Friday telecasts kicks in at 6 p.m., which is why it was able to get away with adding a 3 p.m. Black Friday game to its slate (the law doesn’t specify any specific time zones for that statute). Also, the rules disappear in mid-December, after college seasons used to end. Which is why, this year, an expanded College Football Playoff will go head-to-head with the NFL on Saturday, Dec. 21. 

And—as you may have surmised—there is a similar loophole on the front-end of the calendar.

The NFL’s limitations begin on the second Friday in September. With Labor Day being Sep. 1 this year, the league was able to squeeze the Brazil game in without shifting its entire schedule. The same opportunity is open next year, when Labor Day falls on Sep. 2. It’s safe for you to mark your calendars already, I think.

In fact, it seems more likely that the NFL will soon move its season kickoff up a week to spread games across Labor Day Weekend, rather than give up its new Friday slot. The league abandoned LDW in 2001 due to low ratings on the travel-heavy weekend. But a change in the way ratings are now calculated—plus the NFL’s current cultural dominance—makes a return feel inevitable. 

I’m ready for five straight nights of football. And I’m betting, as the NFL keeps expanding to meet the ever-increasing demand for pro football, this kind of stretched out kickoff slate is here to stay.

tl;dr:

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Now turning it over to Eben for his Pick Six, including U.S. Open advertising, trail running, and a crazy fantasy concept…

Story of the Week 🎾: If you watched the U.S. Open these past two weeks, you likely noticed the janky patches on some players’ shirts—Duracell on the man that beat Carlos Alcaraz; Wiss on the woman that beat Sloane Stephens. Did you know they are the result of a formal process at the U.S. Open, with a seamstress in Arthur Ashe Stadium and a marketing agency offering $10,000-$20,000 to no-names who appear in high-profile matches? Our colleague Lev Akabas tells the full story about this fun “marriage of convenience.”

Story of the Week (Non-Sportico Division) 👟: One of the most famous ultramarathons in the world took place this weekend—the Ultra-Trail de Mont-Blanc, or UTMB—and it was won by a relatively unknown, unsponsored 31-year-old named Vincent Bouillard. What I love about the story is that Bouillard is a full-time product engineer at Hoka, and he won the race while wearing a relatively new sneaker prototype that he helped develop. What a way to promote a product! Run has all the details.