The NFL schedule, as currently constructed, has teams playing games on Sundays, Mondays and Thursdays.
Late in the regular season, the league will add a handful of Saturday games. There are also Saturday games for the Wild Card and Divisional Rounds of the postseason.
Previously, NFL teams were limited to one Thursday night game a year. The NFL made a significant adjustment on the scheduling rules earlier this week which means teams could be scheduled for up to two Thursday nighters in any given season.
This change has Pro Football Talk’s Mike Florio convinced that the league could make even more dramatic changes to the schedule. More specifically, Florio thinks the NFL could eventually start scheduling games on Wednesdays and Fridays:
“The expanded use of short weeks and the inclination to shuffle games from Thursdays to Sundays and Sundays to Thursdays suggests a not-too-distant future in which the NFL stages weekly games on Tuesdays and Wednesdays. And perhaps, eventually, on Fridays and Saturdays…
If the league plans to hang its hat on the contention that only three days off between games isn’t a health and safety concern, then four and five days off between games isn’t a concern, either.
It will complicate the scheduling process for the NFL, but it will be worth it (in the league’s view) to pull games from the cluster of 1:00 p.m. ET kickoffs and move them into standalone prime-time windows that will gather millions of live viewers…
The Friday night game could start at 9:00 p.m. ET, giving many high schools a chance to work around that window, if they so choose. Or if a high-school game is being played at a time when an NFL game is being televised, the folks attending the high-school game can watch the pro game on their phone.
For Saturdays, it would be one game and one game only, also played at night. College football all day. Pro football from 8:00 p.m. to 11:00 p.m. ET. And then a late-night West Coast college game after that to end the day.”
There are rare instances where the NFL will play a game on a Tuesday, Wednesday or Friday. Several games in 2020 had to be rescheduled because certain teams were affected by COVID-19.
Since 2010, five games have been played on Tuesday nights.
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The NFL scheduled a New Orleans Saints-Minnesota Vikings Week 16, 2020 game on Christmas Day, which fell on a Friday that year In Week 15 of the 2021 season, the NFL moved the Washington-Philadelphia Eagles and Seattle Seahawks-Los Angeles Rams games to a Tuesday because of COVID-19 outbreaks..
It’s well-known by now that NFL teams don’t like playing on short weeks, and understandably so. But money is always the main talking point for the NFL office and owners, so it certainly wouldn’t be a surprise if they tried adding games to Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Fridays, as Florio suggested.
