How the NFL Grinch Stole the NBA's Christmas
For decades, Christmas belonged to the NBA — until football realized the old rules of the sports calendar no longer mattered.
(Programming Note: We’ll be taking tomorrow and Thursday off from posting for Christmas — don’t worry, the models and stats will still update — so here’s wishing you and yours a happy and safe holiday! 🎄❤️)
Like many of you reading this, I suspect, I grew up with a pretty clear idea of which sports “owned” which parts of the calendar.
College football had New Year’s Day covered, with perhaps a little room carved out for hockey and the Winter Classic. Memorial Day weekend was all about auto racing. The Fourth of July belonged to baseball, as did Mother’s Day and Father’s Day (break out the pink bats and blue accoutrements) and Labor Day, too — when the final-month playoff push truly sets in. Thanksgiving was all about watching NFL games while eating turkey, and Christmas was NBA territory since at least when Bernard King dropped 60 in the Garden on December 25, 1984:
But times change, and old traditions are torn down in favor of new ones. And perhaps nowhere is that more apparent than in the NFL’s recent takeover of Christmas Day from the NBA, starting in 2020 and continuing into Thursday’s slate, which features Cowboys-Commanders and Lions-Vikings on Netflix and Broncos-Chiefs in the nightcap on Prime Video.
It’s not fair to say the NFL never had a presence on Christmas at all until recently. The league occasionally played games on December 25 when the holiday conveniently aligned with its usual weekend windows — including a controversial pair of playoff games in 1971 and sporadic regular-season contests, always in the late afternoon or evening,1 starting in 1989. But those appearances were rare, restrained and clearly treated as exceptions to the general rule of no NFL games on Christmas, rather than as a direct challenge to the NBA’s traditional holiday showcase.
However, the NBA itself began turning Christmas into more and more of a TV event, scheduling FIVE games per year on the holiday starting in 2008, rather than the usual two or three. What used to feel like a curated hoops event slowly became a full-day basketball marathon, stretching from late morning deep into the night. While that expansion made Christmas bigger for the league in the short-term, it diluted the sense that any single game was the must-watch matchup. In the process, it also made the day look less like sacred territory and more like an overwrought block of television programming — ripe for competition.
And so, after averaging fewer than 0.5 Christmas Day games per year from the 1980s through the 2010s, the NFL barged into the holiday for good with the Vikings and Saints in the COVID season of 2020. That game did so well — scoring more than 20 million viewers across FOX and the NFL Network — that the league expanded to two games in 2021 and three in 2022.
Those games, in turn, shattered records — Packers-Browns in 2021 garnered 28.59 million viewers, making it the most-watched Christmas Day sporting event in at least two decades at the time. And then came 2023, when the Chiefs and Raiders broke that record with 29.2 million viewers. Even after a dip with the switch to streaming-platform exclusivity last year, Chiefs-Steelers and Ravens-Texans collectively averaged 24.2 million viewers.
By contrast, the NBA has pulled in less than 20 percent of the NFL’s viewership numbers since the head-to-head began 5 years ago, with no individual NBA game scoring higher than 7.76 million viewers for LeBron James’ Lakers versus Steph Curry’s Warriors last year. After the game, James said, “I love the NFL, but Christmas is our day.” But unfortunately, the ratings numbers tell a different story:
As Jon Lewis of SportsMediaWatch pointed out here, the NFL’s dominance over the NBA in Christmas Day ratings isn’t exactly a new phenomenon to the past few seasons. Even historically, every time football has played games on December 25 alongside basketball, the NFL has won the head-to-head viewership battle — often by overwhelming margins. The league has never lost a Christmas Day ratings battle in the aggregate, and only twice — in 2009 and 2010, both games featuring James versus Kobe Bryant — did the most-watched NBA game surpass the most-watched NFL contest of the day.
So maybe the real question is why the NFL didn’t try to steal Christmas from the NBA sooner?
The answer appears to be a mix of restraint and incentive. For decades, another holiday stage simply wasn’t worth the effort for a league that already owned Sundays, Thanksgiving and the January-February postseason spotlight, especially when the NBA’s showcase games were still capable of producing some level of marquee audience numbers. But once those NBA peaks began to slip — and once Nielsen’s inclusion of out-of-home viewing in 2020 suddenly supercharged football’s already enormous numbers — the NFL’s calculus changed. Christmas went from a courtesy the NFL could afford extending to a fellow league, to a ratings bonanza it could no longer justify passing up.
And so now, the modern sports fan is left to split Christmas between football and basketball like a child of divorced parents awkwardly sharing custody — with one party deciding the old arrangements no longer hold anymore.
Perhaps the NHL has the best idea: Simply getting out of the bigger sports’ way. The league has long gone on a holiday break for Christmas Eve and Christmas Day — even trades are prohibited around the holiday — and in recent years, the league has trended toward fewer games on both December 23 (though there are plenty tonight) and December 26, with more games loaded onto the 27th:
But the NBA doesn’t have the luxury of ceding its own signature holiday away to the NFL, even if the latter is an unbeatable ratings machine. This week’s slate of holiday football games are about as meaningless as it gets — five of the six teams involved are either eliminated from playoff contention or have very low odds — so maybe the NBA’s showcase games can give us a better show anyway. But whatever the outcome, there’s no doubt anymore that the old rules of the sports calendar, and the deference they once implied, now belong to holidays past.
Apparently the NFL received complaints about how the 1971 games had encroached upon family holiday time.
To be fair to the league's schedulers, it probably seemed like a safe bet at the beginning of the season that at least one of these Christmas Day games would have significant playoff implications.