This is an automated archive made by the Lemmit Bot.
The original was posted on /r/nfl by /u/Ok-Soil-5133 on 2025-12-04 02:41:47+00:00.
“The NFL’s been hoarding standalone windows for years, so Black Friday was always going to end up on Goodell’s holiday checklist. The league framed it as extending the Thanksgiving weekend into a full football marathon, which makes sense, but there’s still the Sports Broadcasting Act of 1961 sitting in the middle of all this.
The law prohibits the league from broadcasting games on Friday nights and Saturdays between the second Friday in September and the second Saturday in December, but only within 75 miles of high school or college football games. It was designed to protect those levels of the sport from getting steamrolled by the NFL’s audience.
The league’s gotten creative working around it, but adding a second Black Friday game complicates things. You can’t stack two games in the same afternoon window without one of them bleeding deep into Friday night, which would almost certainly trigger the broadcasting restrictions. The NFL could try putting one game in the early afternoon and another later, but that second slot would technically need to finish before prime time.”