This column claims no insider knowledge of the maintenance schedule for the NFL offices at 345 Park Avenue in Manhattan, except for the fact that if it were so inclined, the NFL could turn the simple act of vacuuming the place into a three-day event over which the TV networks would compete viciously to carry live in prime time.
The NFL draft is the crown jewel of sports marketing, an event that requires one hotel conference room and a couple of dozen cell phones but somehow commands months of breathless, highly speculative media coverage culminating in a roaming festival that draws tens of thousands to the host city and millions of viewers to the league’s various media platforms.
The draft was last month, but an even more convincing display of the league’s marketing genius came last week, with the release of the league’s schedule for the season that begins in only another 16 weeks.
Every team in the league and every avid fan of every team in the league already knew who they were playing in the fall, just as every team and every fan already knew where those games were going to be played. Yet the simple act of assigning actual dates has somehow been engineered into another prime time event watched by millions.
If, as the great Eagles fan Ben Franklin once noted, life’s only certainties are death and taxes, a third would be that Americans will watch anything.
But even the NFL is aware that you’ve got to have something new to sell every now and again, which is why there’s a Black Friday game on the schedule for the first time. The Jets will host the Dolphins at 3 p.m. Nov. 24, the day after Thanksgiving.
The idea that the Jets would want to play a football game while everyone is out shopping makes perfect sense, as it happens, because just as shoppers have developed their own tradition of hyperventilating en masse on that particular day, the Jets have a long tradition of being terrible at football.
Even in the post-modern era of efficient passing attacks, it’s worth noting that the Jets’ all-time leading passer is still Joe Namath, who retired 46 years ago. Their all-time leading receiver is still Don Maynard, who retired 50 years ago, and their all-time winningest coach, Weeb Ewbank (71-77-6), has been dead for 25 years.
The longest current string of playoff-free NFL seasons belongs to the Jets, with 12, and nobody is close.
So why in the name of Neil O’Donnell would the league pick the Jets as the first and perhaps permanent host of Black Friday Football, particularly with the Bengals volunteering for the gig along with plenty of other more viable footballers who would make more sense? How ‘bout Steelers-Raiders, the black and gold vs. the black and silver on Black Friday?
Is this why I don’t have an NFL marketing job?
One media analyst described Jets-on-Black Friday as a no brainer, and I think we can all agree.
Turns out they got the job in part because of Amazon, which started carrying Thursday games last season on Amazon Prime.
“Amazon did reach out to us and suggested, ‘Maybe, as we’re the retail leader in this space and New York is the biggest market and the Number 1 retail market, maybe a game in New York might be a fun way to introduce this concept,’” said Mike North, NFL veep for broadcast planning told the New York Daily News without wondering if Amazon had ever heard of the Giants. “Some people in the league liked the idea of a Chiefs-Raiders game in that spot, Black Friday in the Black Hole.”
Since Amazon is paying the NFL $1 billion for its stubbornly unpopular Thursday night package, it could probably call up and suggest the NFL play five quarters instead of four and the league would have to give it serious consideration.
Should you be wondering whether the NFL has ever played a game on a Friday, it’s because your command of NFL trivia falls just short of knowing that the league’s all-time record for passing yards in a game, 554 by Norm Van Brocklin, then of the Rams, was set on a Friday night in Los Angeles in 1951.
Beyond the blockbuster Black Friday “news,” out of last week’s schedule-release extravaganza, the highlights appeared to be that new Jets quarterback Aaron Rodgers would be on stage for the first Monday night game on Sept. 11, and that the Eagles would play the Giants on Christmas Day, another holiday the league wouldn’t mind owning.
Funny, when the Eagles won the NFL championship in 1960, they played the Packers on a Monday afternoon, because Sunday was Christmas, and you don’t play football on Christmas, because that would be crazy.
In any event, it’ll be interesting to see the retail numbers for November. A lot of people make it a policy to avoid the stores on Black Friday, but now that the Jets are involved ...
