Scott Van Pelt: ‘Entirely unnecessary’ to open NFL season on a Wednesday, play in Australia
· Yahoo Sports
The NFL season is here. The festivities open with a Wednesday-night edition of Sunday Night Football, followed by an NFC West clash that kicks off at 10:30 a.m. local time in Melbourne.
It is just the latest sign of the NFL’s insatiable hunger to dominate the sports calendar, growing and expanding by whatever means necessary.
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People will watch, and the action will likely be compelling, but the league’s push for more territory is obvious year by year. And ESPN’s Scott Van Pelt is pumping the brakes.
“Wednesday, just ’cause you can? Yeah, this is, like, ’cause you can,” Van Pelt said this week on his podcast. “Rams-Niners in Australia? For what? Because they like football? Great, they can turn it on. It’s already Christmas in Australia. It’s a month-and-a-half ahead.”
Van Pelt drilled the point home, noting that the Australia game is not merely a throwaway matchup but a key divisional clash among two of the league’s prestige teams. The two teams’ opposite approaches to travel make for a fascinating story, but also indicate how unusual the game will be.
“I just feel like it’s just entirely unnecessary,” Van Pelt added. “But none of it matters. Let’s just do it. Hey, the NBA kinda has this Christmas thing. ‘Oh, that’s cool, we’re doing it.’ Alright.”
Many have pointed to the NFL’s Netflix-aided incursion into the NBA’s territory on Christmas Day three years ago as the inflection point in the league’s aggressive schedule expansion. The move came shortly after the NFL added a 17th game; it is already on its way to 18. And Netflix is expected to play a big role in the league’s plans to play a game overseas each week of the season in the near future.
Beyond the added expenses and time suck of keeping up with the NFL these days, fans now often have to choose between the NFL and big games in the NBA and college football.
The NFL’s numbers show no signs of slowing, so they keep pushing. Rather than a complaint, Van Pelt’s comments read more like a warning to the league.
“It’s not that I don’t love it, I just think at some point — and they’ve already reached the point — they’ve taken so many of the games that are significant out of the Sunday window, that the space that already belonged entirely to them is just marginalized,” he said.
“But what they realize is that’s going to be long to us anyway. If all we have is the ‘poop-town’ window, doesn’t matter. It’s still ours. Then we can take our other stuff and sprinkle it across the board and own those other spaces. Which they do. But there’s no ‘We’re good.’ If some is good, more is better; the most is the best. And they just take the most.”
If this trend continues, fans—if they aren’t already—will grow tired of the NFL spreading games throughout the week. It can seem absurd to complain about more football, but too much of anything can become tiresome.
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