Will holiday ratings triumph drive NFL to more Christmas games?

While the NBA has a longer tradition of Christmas games, the NFL dominated the ratings this Dec. 25, pulling in over 27 million viewers for each of their three games, while the NBA barely cracked a million with its late games.

It was a brutal reminder of how much more popular the NFL is than any other American sport. Since Christmas was on a Monday this year, the NBA couldn't have games on ESPN and ABC after the Lakers-Celtics matchup, because those channels were showing 49ers-Ravens in the evening, further hurting the NBA's numbers.

For a while, the NFL was content to leave Christmas to the NBA, often playing its normal slate of games on Saturday when Christmas fell on a Sunday. In fact, the league made a concerted effort to not play on Christmas. In the '80s, the NFL twice sandwiched playoff games around the Christmas holiday, playing games on Saturday and Monday. Even when they did play on Christmas, the league would start night games late to miss family dinners, and until last year, the NFL never had a Christmas game that started before 3:30 p.m. EST.

From 2012-15, and in both 2018 and 2019, there were no NFL games on Christmas, when the holiday was Tuesday-Friday. But in 2022 and 2023, the NFL put up three games, which means over 10 hours of football, not counting pre-game shows - which also did better than the NBA games.

Next year, Christmas is on a Wednesday, which is tough to accommodate for a regular-season schedule. In theory, they could have teams that were playing on Wednesday also play Saturday, to give them at least three days rest. But it's tough to juggle the schedule, especially late in the season. However, with Christmas falling on a Thursday in 2025, expect the NFL to add at least one extra game, if not two more. 

Is this a problem for the NBA? Not necessarily. It's a drop in ratings, but they're still getting a lot of viewers - just not as many as in the past. The league seems to be consciously avoiding football, moving the weekly TNT games to Tuesdays early in the season to avoid Thursday Night Football, and playing no games at all on three Sundays in December.

But while NFL games are event programming, the NBA is essentially a volume shooter when it comes to broadcasts. NFL teams play 17 games compared to 82 for NBA teams. There's three weekends of NFL playoffs before the Super Bowl while the NBA has playoff games almost daily for six weeks before the NBA Finals. Regular-season basketball games are almost never appointment viewing - there's a reason ABC doesn't start playing NBA games on Saturday nights until Jan. 27 - one week after the last NFL Saturday game.

Still, the ratings show that the NBA no longer owns Christmas. As long as there's NFL football on TV, every other sport is finishing second.