The Vikings and Saints will meet on Christmas Day in a game that could be incredibly huge for both teams – but no matter what the playoff implications may be, they are guaranteed to make history.
December 25 is a Friday this year, so the minute they kick off, the two teams will assure that, for the first time ever, the NFL played at least one game on every single day of the week during a season.
Sundays have always been about the NFL, and over the years, we’ve added Monday Night Football, Thursday Night Football (first on Thanksgiving only, and then weekly), and, most recently, a handful of Saturday games late in the season once the collegiate regular season is over.
This year, though, COVID postponements have pushed two games to Tuesday – the Week 5 Titans-Bills game, and this week’s Ravens-Cowboys tilt – and gave us a Wednesday afternoon Ravens-Steelers contest, so the Christmas Friday will give us the full monty.
NFL games on either mid-week day are, as you might imagine, incredibly rare. Prior to this year, each day had only seen one in the modern era (since 1950), both of which came in the last decade; a 2010 Vikings-Eagles game was moved from Sunday to Tuesday because of a forecasted blizzard in the Philadelphia area, and in 2012, the season-opener between the Giants and Cowboys was moved from Thursday to Wednesday to not interfere with President Barack Obama’s keynote address at the Democratic National Convention.
Friday games are a little less rare – there have been 10 since the 1970 AFL-NFL merger alone, the last in 2009 – but never before had even five days been utilized on the weekly calendar during an NFL season, let alone all seven.
2020, man…gives new meaning to “Any Given Sunday,” doesn’t it?
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