Ready for another football feast?
As teams, leagues and broadcasters become increasingly coordinated, the football calendar is filling up—but fans always seem to be able to make room for more.
Welcome back to Club Sportico, where we break down the intersection of sports and money—with an extra bit of humor and opinion. Today, we’re carving up leftovers.
Like every good tradition, the Lions playing on Thanksgiving started as a desperate bid for attention. The young NFL franchise had just moved to Detroit from Portsmouth, Ohio, in 1934, changed its name to draft off the popularity of the Detroit Tigers, and convinced a network of NBC radio stations nationwide to broadcast its game against the Chicago Bears if they agreed to play on the holiday. They’ve held onto the time slot basically every year since, while the Cowboys came along later to—as they often do—supersize proceedings and ensure that the NFL would become a Thanksgiving staple.
Thursday’s triple-header likely set records for most-watched regular season game (which basically means most watched non-NFL anything in recent history) thanks to the NFL putting two of its biggest brands—the Chiefs and Cowboys—up against each other, though we won’t have the official numbers for a few days.
In the meantime, there’s more football to watch. Amazon has now proven fans will tune back in on Friday afternoon (when federal law requires the league to play its midseason weekday games), and the league has rewarded them with a clash of 8-3 Bears and Eagles (3 p.m. ET). The game will also stream globally to feed the league’s hunger for growth. Prime Video will follow that up with a pair of NBA games… but I’m betting more fans will flip over to find more football rather than stick around.
And college teams, increasingly as desperate for fan dollars as those nascent pro franchises, will be there waiting for them. ABC, CBS, Fox, and NBC all have college football on today as rival institutions put aside their differences to cooperate on bits of proactive scheduling. Georgia and Georgia Tech go head-to-head at 3:30 p.m. on ABC, challenging the NFL for TV time, before Texas and Texas A&M square off at 7:30 p.m. (ABC), followed by Arizona and Arizona State at 9 ET (Fox).
Fans will hardly have 12 hours to recover before Ohio State and Michigan kick off at their god-given noon Saturday slot to start another day full of marquee showdowns. Then, of course, the NFL returns on Sunday after giving god back a couple hours in the morning.
As college sports professionalize, football programs increasingly feel pinched for cash. Meanwhile TV companies, facing digital competition, are starved for must-see content. The two sides have never needed each other more, as a partnership nearly a century in the making seems to finally be reaching its potential.
In the early days, the sports calendar was filled organically by individual teams and owners—some sticking with tradition, others willing to buck trends for bucks. But now it’s all more sophisticated. The NFL has turned to the power of artificial intelligence to craft its schedule, placing each and every game in what it hopes is the optimal position.
College football is catching up too. There’s a push for more consolidation, cooperation, and coordination until we get to the inevitable world of a similarly singularly crafted schedule for top teams, even if that takes Congressional intervention. Thanksgiving Eve games feel like an inevitability, and maybe Friday morning football too.
Just like the turkey on our plate, what was once found in nature will soon be fattened up and made-to-specifications by science. Be thankful for that.
Club Sportico is a community organized by Sportico, a digital media company launched in 2020 to cover the business side of sports. You can read breaking news, smart analysis, and in-depth features from Eben, Jacob and their colleagues at Sportico.com, and listen to the Sporticast podcast wherever you get your audio. Contact us at club@sportico.com.