Memorial Day is celebrated as the unofficial beginning of summer for most of the country. But it also represents one of the peak times on the sports calendar… except strangely enough for the holiday itself.
I will admit that the last thing you probably want to do on Memorial Day is sit on the couch and watch 12 hours of sports when you could be golfing, grilling, fishing, or engaging in some exercise and experiencing natural air and sunlight. It’s not like Christmas or Thanksgiving where you have to be inside for the vast majority of the country and you’re looking for any escape from awkward family dynamics. And admittedly sports is not the priority with the day set aside to honor those who gave their lives while serving in the armed forces.
But given the landscape of what’s possible on the sports calendar right now and what happens on Memorial Day itself compared to other holidays and we can see that today’s sports offerings are severely lacking.
Let’s start with the fact that Memorial Day weekend is great and highlighted by the Super Bowl of motorsports with the Monaco Grand Prix, Indianapolis 500, and Coca-Cola 600 all happening on the same day. Next year Monaco will move off the weekend so it’s the last “motorsports Christmas” we will see for the foreseeable future. But having two of the top races on the American calendar on the same day is still very cool.
But as for the rest of the sports calendar, some work can be done.
Memorial Day itself features a full slate of MLB action throughout the day, the NCAA men’s lacrosse final, and competing NBA and NHL conference final games tonight. And that’s… pretty much it unless you want to count the early rounds of the French Open.
Not having something today is a missed opportunity for a lot of sports leagues.
As far as the NBA and NHL is concerned, the NHL could easily move up today’s conference final matchup, which is Game 4 of the Hurricanes-Panthers series, so that it doesn’t have to go head-to-head with the Thunder and Timberwolves in the NBA’s conference final series. Right now the hockey starts at 8 p.m. ET and the basketball starts at 8:30 p.m. ET. Those could easily be 6 p.m. and 9 p.m. start times to make for a cross-sport doubleheader.
But that’s been an issue throughout these playoffs as NBA and NHL games are constantly competing with each other. Given TNT and ESPN are the major rightsholders for both, some more creative scheduling could have built more opportunities of cooperation between the leagues and networks.
And what about the WNBA? ESPN has the rights to tonight’s NBA game. Could you imagine the WNBA doing a showcase double or tripleheader throughout the day as a build up to the playoff game? Why not work with ESPN to make it their version of the NBA on Christmas Day and feature spotlight stars and franchises to turn it into a marquee event. The WNBA is hotter than ever, so why not capitalize on a holiday when there is so little competition?
Imagine a Memorial Day doubleheader where you could put Paige Bueckers against Caitlin Clark with the Wings and Fever and then follow it up with a Lynx-Liberty finals rematch. Instead, the WNBA is completely off today.
The door is wide open for other sports to grab a foothold. What if the PGA Tour played a Friday-Monday tournament at the Colonial to claim the Memorial Day holiday? Why can’t MLS and the NWSL play a doubleheader with a big stadium game? At the very least, one major nationally televised game in either league would make all the sense in the world. Both American soccer leagues are off today, too.
Even the national pastime itself, Major League Baseball, is woefully under-represented. There are zero nationally televised games today on Memorial Day. Zero! On a Memorial Day holiday! MLB claimed success for their first ever rivalry weekend of games last weekend, but why not put it on a holiday weekend where so many more people might be available to fill up the ballpark? Why aren’t Yankees-Red Sox or Giants-Dodgers or Cubs-White Sox on Fox Sports tonight?
Across the linear television networks today before 8 p.m. ET your live sports choices are the NCAA men’s lacrosse final on ESPN and the French Open on TNT. ESPN, ESPN2, and FS1 are mostly airing their usual array of studio shows. FS1 in primetime is showing a replay of yesterday’s Indianapolis 500. CBS Sports Network also has a replay of yesterday’s PGA Tour final round. And the only special event on broadcast television is the American Music Awards.
We’re not asking for a deluge of live sports on Memorial Day because once again, it’s healthy to touch grass every now and then. But something, anything, would be an improvement over the bleak landscape that we have right now.
Studio shows and replays? Come on sports world, you can do a lot better for Memorial Day. At the very least, we could have saved the Wienie 500 for today.