Week 16 schedule contains odd glitch for the Saturday games
Earlier this week, Fox announced that it will televise a Week 16 Saturday doubleheader featuring the Packers at the Bears and the Eagles at the Commanders. The official schedule contains an odd glitch regarding those games.
The NFL.com version of the 2025 schedule currently shows that those games will happen on Friday, December 19.
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Also, the official website schedule for each of the four teams contains a TBD as to the time AND the date of the Week 16 games. (For confirmation — and acknowledging the possibility they might change it before you click on it — here are the Eagles, Commanders, Packers, and Bears.)
Again, there are other indications that the games are indeed set for Saturday, December 20. But if the use of "Friday, December 19" on the main NFL.com schedule is a typo, it's a bizarre one. It wasn't the result of a misplaced finger; someone specifically picked Friday, December 19 as the date for those two games.
While there's no reason to think the games will be played on Friday, it makes us wonder whether at some point the plan was to play the games (which supposedly will begin at 4:30 p.m. ET and 8:00 p.m. ET) on Friday.
It meshes with the notion that, in time, the league will take even greater advantage of the fringes of the Sports Broadcasting Act of 1961, which allows the NFL to televise games on Friday night and Saturday before the second weekend in September and after the second weekend in December.
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Is it crazy to think that, as of last week, those games were going to be played on Friday night and that, after Senator Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) said in a committee hearing regarding the pivot from broadcasting to streaming that the NFL has "tiptoed up to the rule," the NFL decided to move the games from Friday to Saturday, which is the far more traditional spot for late-season non-Sunday games?
Whatever the explanation, it's one of the very weird things we noticed when scouring over the schedule. And it could be a sign that, sooner than later, late-season Fridays will become the newest spot in the pizza into which the cheese is stuffed.
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