Football diehards might need to rethink their night plans for New Year’s Eve. The NFL has officially canceled its final Sunday Night Football game of the year. Instead, all of the games will be held at either the 1 p.m. or 4 p.m. EST time slots.
This decision marks the first time that the NFL has not held a primetime game to close out the season since 1977.
The usual move for the final regular season game of the year is to showcase a matchup with playoff implications between two divisional teams. However, this season’s playoff picture has so many moving parts and potential scenarios going into the final week that the NFL announced it would place all of the games in daytime slots.
"We felt that both from a competitive standpoint and from a fan perspective, the most fair thing to do is to schedule all Week 17 games in either the 1 p.m. or 4:25 p.m. ET windows," said NFL senior vice president of broadcasting Howard Katz in an official press release.
Sure, this is certainly a plausible reasoning for axing a night game from the docket this weekend, but let’s be honest, who was really going to watch a primetime football game on New Year’s Eve anyway? The NFL has already had its fair share of bad publicity (here’s only the most recent example) this past year, a decrease in ratings being one of them. Trying to get a significant amount of people to watch a three-plus hour game while they are a few shots deep wearing “2018” glasses probably is not the smartest move from a business perspective.
In fact, the last time the NFL held a night game on New Year’s Eve back in 2007 between the Brett Favre-led Green Bay Packers and playoff bound Chicago Bears, it only got a less than stellar 13.4 million viewers. For context, more people tuned into Deal or No Deal that week.
For a 2017 that proved to be rough waters for the NFL, canceling one of its primary weekly time slots in its final week of the regular season seems like the only fitting conclusion. On the bright side, at least some fans won’t have to choose between the New Year’s Eve party or the big game.
