Could Wednesday Become the NFL’s Next Big Night?
The expansion of the NFL's weekly schedule may be slowly beginning. In 2026, there will be two Wednesday games: the Seattle Seahawks hosting the New England Patriots in a Super Bowl LX rematch to kick off the season on September 9th, and the Green Bay Packers traveling to take on the Los Angeles Rams in the first-ever Thanksgiving Eve contest on November 25th. While the league is mainly known for playing games on Sundays, Mondays, and Thursdays, with a few Saturdays sprinkled in, Wednesday games are much rarer and a near-foreign concept for a league that has consistently maintained a set structure. In recent years, though, Wednesday games have been popping up more and more, with no clear end in sight.
However, despite this seemingly new development, Wednesday NFL games were once quite common. In the early decades of pro football, games were played on any day of the week, since there was much less structure. One thing that became clear from these mid-week games was the toll it took on the players. The reduced recovery time led many of them to sustain injuries, and those who did not were still sluggish and fatigued for their following weekend games. From the 1950s onward, the NFL stopped scheduling these games and settled into the modern format we see today.
Even with a set structure, though, some exceptions and adjustments have to be made to accommodate the world around the NFL. In 2012, the season's opening game between the Dallas Cowboys and New York Giants was moved up from Thursday to Wednesday to avoid competing with the Democratic National Convention. In 2020, the Baltimore Ravens and Pittsburgh Steelers were set to play on Thanksgiving night, but the game was postponed until the following Wednesday due to rampant COVID-19 outbreaks among both teams. These are two examples of the NFL having to adjust to circumstances beyond its control by scheduling a game on Wednesday. The same cannot be said for the following examples.
In 2024, Christmas Day fell on a Wednesday, and, having seen the ratings success of the previous Wednesday's Ravens-Steelers game, which averaged 10.8 million viewers, the NFL scheduled two games that day involving both teams. The Steelers lost on Christmas to the Kansas City Chiefs, 29-10, while the Ravens beat the Texans in Houston, 31-2. These matchups were even bigger rating successes, averaging over 24 million viewers each. This showed the NFL that fans will watch games on Wednesday, a strong motivator for scheduling more games on that day. While the opening match between the Patriots and Seahawks is scheduled for Wednesday to make way for the first-ever game in Australia between the San Francisco 49ers and Los Angeles Rams on Thursday, the match between the Rams and Packers does not need such space. No game has ever been played on the day before Thanksgiving, and that day has never been viewed as a significant day for sports. The NFL may be preparing to increase the number of Wednesday games and perhaps even make them part of the weekly schedule. Only time will tell how much this develops, however, and the ramifications are sure to be drastic.
