An intermingling of seasonal rites will occur Sunday afternoon, a collision that’s not quite a disturbance in the force but jarring, nonetheless.
In the Arizona desert, Chicago Cubs pitchers and catchers will lace up their spikes and take the fields in Mesa for their first workout of the 2025 season.
A few hours later, under the domed roof of New Orleans’ Superdome, the Philadelphia Eagles and Kansas City Chiefs will kick off Super Bowl 59, wrapping up the 2024 season with all the attendant glitz and gorging associated with the USA’s biggest secular holiday.
And for the second consecutive year, the NFL season will bleed into the symbolic start of the following baseball season, an oddity that will likely become the norm as Big Football expands its footprint and other leagues aim to keep up.
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Like animals roaming beyond their natural habitats, major professional sports seasons are increasingly unbeholden to their traditional calendars.
The trend will only deepen: In 2027, the Super Bowl will be played on Valentine’s Day, coincidentally in the same year commissioner Roger Goodell aimed for the NFL to exceed $25 billion in annual revenue. That goal is expected to be hastened by the addition of an 18th regular season game, which will require amending the league’s collective bargaining agreement, yet also expanding the revenue-sharing pie for owners and players.
Barring any unlikely schedule adjustments, an 18th game would push the NFL season closer to March than January and align with the league’s utopian vision for global domination.
“The NFL is not concerned about it getting any bigger. The NFL’s goal all along has been to have people talking about its league and its games around the calendar,” says Dennis Deninger, professor emeritus at Syracuse, former producer for ESPN and author of ‘The Football Game That Changed America.’
“When you look at the NFL draft pushing into spring, the training camps in the middle of the summer, it has taken over the calendar of sports.”
It’s a content drift nearly a half-century in the making.
Trends towards March
In 1977, the NFL played its final 14-game season, across a footprint that looks unrecognizable to the modern eye.
The first Sunday of games fell on Sept. 18 – and the Super Bowl still was completed by Jan. 15. A year later, the 16-game schedule debuted, with a Sept. 3 Sunday kickoff and a Jan. 21 Super Bowl.
Over the next two decades, a handful of factors dictated the start and end of the NFL season.
In 1990, a bye week was added, pushing the Super Bowl to Jan. 27 and then Jan. 31 two years later. In 1993, an ill-fated double-bye schedule made for an 18-week regular season, but with a pre-Labor Day start, the season still ended on Jan. 30.
It wasn’t until the 9/11 attacks in 2001, which canceled the week’s second season, that the Super Bowl crept into February, but with just one week between conference championships and the big game, it returned to January the next season.
Yet the game has landed in February every year since Feb. 1, 2004, and in most years the NFL has adopted an “all of the above” approach to scheduling:
A post-Labor Day Week 1, to optimize TV ratings. Two weeks between the conference title games and the Super Bowl, to maximize the buildup. And, since 2021, a 17-game regular season.
Not only does that keep eyeballs on the field – and the flat screen – from September to mid-February, it also cuts down any notion of dead time.
The NFL combine begins barely two weeks after the Super Bowl concludes. The new league year is fully rolling by mid-March. And the NFL draft – inarguably the biggest non-game sporting event on the calendar – lands in late April, with bottomless speculation in the run-up.
By then, the start of training camp in late July is almost in sight.
“The NFL season comes to life, it seems like, 365 days a year, now,” says Dean Corrington, chief marketing officer of Anheuser-Busch.
Just about.
NBA thought Christmas was ‘our day’
Deninger cites a study that indicates the NFL leads all sports leagues in fan interest 11 of 12 months of the year, with June the only period in which it’s trumped by MLB.
Certainly, fan engagement is not a zero-sum game, evidenced by the multibillion-dollar TV contracts enjoyed by MLB, the NBA and Power Four football conferences, and the stratospheric growth of women’s athletics, particularly basketball, at the collegiate and professional level.
Yet prime viewership slots are finite, and there’s little to keep the NFL wedded to Sundays.
LeBron James put that in stark relief on Christmas Day.
It was long the domain of the NBA, which grew the occasion from a game or two featuring single-name superstars (Shaq and Kobe, Michael and the Bulls) into an all-day quintuple-header, the better to satisfy its national rights holders.
With its regular season starting amid the World Series and NFL stretch drive, Christmas grew into a de facto opening day for the NBA. Until this year.
While Christmas has fallen on football-conducive days such as Saturday, Sunday, or Monday before, this year’s holiday would be celebrated on a Wednesday.
No worries: The NFL simply moved a pair of games to the previous Saturday, brought those four teams back on three days’ rest and staged a holiday doubleheader.
Oh, and lured Beyoncé to her hometown of Houston for an iconic Cowboy Carter halftime show.
Hours later, James led the Los Angeles Lakers to victory over the Golden State Warriors – LeBron vs. Steph keeping with the holiday superstar theme – and afterward bemoaned what he could sense was diminished shine thanks to the NFL doubleheader.
“I love the NFL,” James said in a postgame interview, “I love the NFL. But Christmas is our day.”
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Days later, James’ steadfast pride gave way to pragmatism.
The football doubleheader lured 65 million viewers to Netflix, which was making its NFL streaming debut. The second game featuring the Ravens and Texans peaked at more than 27 million viewers.
Lakers-Warriors? It averaged 7.7 million viewers and peaked at 8.3 million. In the post-ratings spin, the NBA could tout that it was the most-watched regular season game since 2019 and its most-watched Christmas slate in five years.
Yet it’s clear a holiday party crasher took a pretty massive hunk out of the ham.
“From a viewership (standpoint), you all kicked our (expletive),” James said on Travis and Jason Kelce’s podcast a couple of weeks later. “But when you go out there, you got your little brother, and he may get beat up one time. You’re like, ‘Hey, we didn’t lose that fight. We’re staying here.’
“That’s how I felt. I had to stand up. I had to stand up for the NBA.”
‘Survival of the fittest’
It’s a tango that almost every sport is doing.
College football hoped for more exclusivity to the third Saturday in December for the opening round of its Playoff; the NFL ceded a primetime window but still ran a doubleheader up against a CFP tripleheader – and easily prevailed in ratings.
Meanwhile, semifinal rounds were held on a Thursday and Friday to duck the NFL. And the championship game was held on a Monday, Jan. 20, assuming the Monday Night Football slot that was extended a week because of – wait for it – the expanded NFL Wild Card Weekend.
It’s not optimal to stage a title game so late in the year that other college teams are already running gassers in anticipation of the next season – or stocking up in the transfer portal. But ducking the behemoth is something every sport has to do – which is why MLB World Series games are no longer contested on Sunday nights.
“It’s the survival of the fittest,’ says Deninger. “And if the NFL sees a good reason to be on any day during their calendar, they’ll pursue that. They’re not going to step aside and make way for other sports. What always happens is other sports make way for the NFL.”
Yet it’s getting pretty cramped in the corners. An 18th regular season game could push the Super Bowl to the third week of February – lining it up with Presidents Day Weekend and creating a holiday for many fans the day after the Super Bowl.
That would also conflict with the NBA All-Star Game, once again forcing a league to move a jewel event forward or backward on the calendar.
And so it goes.
With eyes on expanding international games to 16 per year and keeping both legacy and nascent broadcast partners well-fed, Goodell’s revenue dreams are drawing closer.
Other leagues have similar dreams to span the globe and harvest more audiences.
The Cubs are reporting Sunday because they’ll open the season early, with mid-March games in Japan pitting their own Asian stars such as Seiya Suzuki and Shota Imanaga against the Dodgers’ trio of Shohei Ohtani, Yoshinobu Yamamoto and Rōki Sasaki.
The years aren’t getting any longer. But the calendar’s only getting more crowded, so make way for odd bedfellows – like pitchers and catchers reporting, and a Lombardi Trophy presentation, all in one day.
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