The NFL has been busy tinkering with its schedule over the past couple of years. They took away one preseason game, added an extra regular-season game and set up a Christmas triple-header for 2022. The NFL is again trying something different in the future, in the form of adding a Black Friday game. The league -- in conjunction with Amazon -- announced that in 2023 Prime Video will exclusively stream the first-ever Black Friday game.
The game will take place Friday, Nov. 24, 2023 with an expected kickoff of 3 p.m. ET. The participating teams will be announced when the 2023 scheduled is released.
"Thursday Night Football has already proven tremendously successful on Prime Video, delivering millions of viewers every week, and we're excited to expand our relationship with the NFL with the inaugural Black Friday game, starting next year," Jay Marine, Global Head of Sports, Prime Video, said in the release. "Black Friday is the unofficial start of the holiday season, and we're thrilled to kick it off with a gift for football fans across the country with this new game."
The NFL is known for its Thanksgiving games, and adding a game on the day after Thanksgiving would just add to its dominance of the week/weekend. Just this past Thanksgiving, the Las Vegas Raiders vs. Dallas Cowboys delivered an estimated 38.531 million viewers, which made it the most-watched NFL regular-season game on any network since 1990.
In an April edition of Peter King's Football Morning In America, it was revealed that NFL owners passed a resolution to give two more teams a second game on a short week -- which opened the door for a Black Friday game.
"Thanksgiving is synonymous with football and we're excited to give our fans another day of NFL action during this holiday weekend," said Hans Schroeder, Chief Operating Officer for NFL Media. "Amazon is uniquely positioned to partner with us for this game as Black Friday is one of the most important days of the year for their business."
Other sports such as college football, the NBA and NHL typically have games on Black Friday, but they don't say the NFL is king for no reason. The last time the NFL played games on a Friday that wasn't on a holiday was in 1986.
