The NFL once avoided Christmas games. It now embraces them

Patrick Mahomes and pumpkin pie. Gang Green and green-bean casserole. Christian McCaffrey and cranberry sauce. Football and Christmas Day. Because, I mean, of course. 

Christmas Day and a festive fiesta of National Football League action is a combo that has become an entrenched part of our holiday enjoyment, but it has crept up so rapidly that it is easy to forget this particular treat is one that doesn’t bring very much tradition with it at all. 

As we congregate around the television for the Dec. 25 slate of Raiders-Chiefs, Giants-Eagles (4: 30 p.m. ET on FOX and the FOX Sports App) and Ravens-49ers, there won’t be much room for the esteemed and elderly among us to wistfully reminisce about all those footballing Christmases past. 

This might come as enough of a shock to the fresh-faced generation to jolt them momentarily from their phone screens, but just as the NFL now goes to great effort to stage juicy morsels of pigskin enjoyment on Christmas Day, it used to go to even more trouble in trying to avoid Santa’s overtime shift. 

Through virtually the entire 1970s and 1980s, following a 1971 experiment of scheduling a pair of division round games over Yuletide and seeing them not particularly well received, the NFL calendar skirted around Christmas with admirably delicate footwork. 

If that meant stacked Saturdays, massed Mondays or even shifting the entire season forward a week, so be it. If indigestion was coming to American households, it would be a result of pure over-indulgence rather than botched snaps, dropped catches or foolish fumbles. 

No longer. This year’s triple header is a rarity when considered in football’s entire history, but it won’t be an outlier for much longer. There were three games for the first time last year and nine in total over the past four winters. For context, that’s more than what took place, combined, before 2003. 

Forget about letting the NBA have Christmas Day to itself, as used to be the case. The NFL decided to come for your post-unwrapping, card-game-playing, family-bickering time a few years back and it wasn’t much of a ratings battle.

The NBA has most of its biggest stars playing on the 25th as usual, including the historic rivalry of Lakers-Celtics, but it is hard to compete with football at this late-season stage when so much is a stake in terms of postseason positioning. 

Frankly, and this is not a criticism of our predecessors, it is hard to come up with a coherent argument as to why Christmas football could ever reasonably have been considered a bad idea. 

The one compelling factor that will come into play next year is that of competitive balance. The 2024 season is likely to offer the last Christmas Day NFL break for a while, given that the big day lands on a Wednesday, the least popular slot of the week when it comes to the fixture schedulers. 

Asking a team or teams to play midweek, in Week 16 no less, is something the league has shown no indication of favoring at this stage. Everything else is up for grabs, the only possible point of discussion being a Christmas Tuesday — workable but not ideal — which next appears in 2029. 

The importance of the 25th’s games cannot be overstated. The Chiefs are continuing their inconsistent push for a high seed in the AFC, served with a side of wondering whether a certain pop star will be in attendance – Christmas with the family means it’s serious, right? 

Baltimore and San Francisco bring dueling (and conference-leading) 11-3 records to the table, with the victor surely to leave with the status of Super Bowl favorite. 

The Eagles hosting the Giants might bring the most curiosity of all, with Philadelphia three weeks (and three defeats) removed from looking invincible and now in need of a positive upturn for reasons both divisional and confidence-related. 

It’s going to be quite a day. It’s football, and it’s Christmas. It is also, if you’re minded a certain way and your life beats even slightly to a pigskin rhythm, one of the best days of the year. 

Whether the games are something to share with your family or a welcome distraction from irksome in-laws, or simply because watching the NFL is what you like to do – and that’s the most Christmassy ideal there is – festive football is the most natural fit of all. 

Martin Rogers is a columnist for FOX Sports and the author of the FOX Sports Insider newsletter. Follow him on Twitter @MRogersFOX and subscribe to the daily newsletter.