Roger Goodell wants more Friday games.
The NFL commissioner told the Wall Street Journal’s Joe Flint this week that the league is considering adding a second Black Friday game, along with other scheduling changes.
“We’re going to look at everything, I would expect there will be changes going forward,” Goodell said.
The NFL’s been hoarding standalone windows for years, so Black Friday was always going to end up on Goodell’s holiday checklist. The league framed it as extending the Thanksgiving weekend into a full football marathon, which makes sense, but there’s still the Sports Broadcasting Act of 1961 sitting in the middle of all this.
The law prohibits the league from broadcasting games on Friday nights and Saturdays between the second Friday in September and the second Saturday in December, but only within 75 miles of high school or college football games. It was designed to protect those levels of the sport from getting steamrolled by the NFL’s audience.
The league’s gotten creative working around it, but adding a second Black Friday game complicates things. You can’t stack two games in the same afternoon window without one of them bleeding deep into Friday night, which would almost certainly trigger the broadcasting restrictions. The NFL could try putting one game in the early afternoon and another later, but that second slot would technically need to finish before prime time.
There’s also the question of whether flooding Black Friday with NFL games kills the appeal. College football learned this lesson the hard way. Friday nights work when there are one or two marquee games. When every conference tries to cram content into the slot, it becomes just another overcrowded night.
College football’s already claimed Friday nights to varying degrees. ESPN and Fox regularly air Power Five games on Fridays. The MAC, Conference USA, and Sun Belt lean on weeknight windows because they can’t compete on Saturdays. If the NFL pushes harder into Fridays with multiple games, it risks cannibalizing an audience that’s already stretched thin between high school, college, and now pro football, all competing for the same eyeballs.
Goodell’s comments suggest the league isn’t particularly concerned about that.
The NFL’s been clear for years that it views every night of the week as potential real estate. Thursday Night Football is firmly established. Christmas games are now an annual tradition. The league’s experimented with Tuesday and Wednesday games during COVID and didn’t rule out bringing them back permanently. Goodell referenced that “flexibility” in 2023 as proof that the NFL could schedule games whenever it wanted.
Goodell didn’t specify what other scheduling changes the league is considering, but the NFL clearly wants more standalone windows. Whether that’s a second Black Friday game, more international morning kickoffs, or testing Tuesdays and Wednesdays again, the league is ready to push every boundary it can.
About Sam Neumann
Since the beginning of 2023, Sam has been a staff writer for Awful Announcing and The Comeback. A 2021 graduate of Temple University, Sam is a Charlotte native, who currently calls Greenville, South Carolina his home. He also has a love/hate relationship with the New York Mets and Jets.