Dallas City News

Soon enough the NFL schedule will be widely known and we can all finally start to plan our fall festivities. As far as the schedule is concerned the only things we know are the teams who Dallas will play this season and that the Cowboys will host a game per tradition on Thanksgiving Day. Everything else is on the table, so to speak.

Widening the scope a bit though we also know that the NFL is set to have two games on Christmas Day this year which is strange given that Christmas falls on a Wednesday in 2024. The NFL knows no bounds, as you can see.

It remains unclear at the time of this writing which broadcast partner will wind up with the rights to broadcast the league’s Christmas Day games, but current reports suggest that it could wind up being Netflix. As noted the league knows no bounds and we live in a world where streaming is as much a part of content consumption these days as basic cable. Remember that the league broadcast a playoff game exclusively on Peacock last season which is a streaming service.

Presuming that Netflix does wind up with the Christmas Day games it is safe to assume that they are going to want their money’s worth because it will likely be a large investment. According to Puck, with a tip of the hat to Variety, the reason that the NFL schedule has taken a bit longer to be released this year has been the closing of the deal between the league and the would-be home of the Christmas Day games.

Netflix will be the “likely winner” of media rights to the pair of NFL games scheduled for Dec. 25 for the upcoming football season, Puck’s John Ourand reported, citing anonymous sources. The report added the caveat that no deal has been signed yet and Netflix and the NFL “still have to clear some hurdles before any deal is announced.”

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Per the Puck report, the NFL delayed the release of its 2024-25 schedule until May 15, and one of the main reasons is that the league has been “in the middle of a high-stakes negotiation with Netflix over its planned Christmas Day games.”

In the spirit of throwing things out for discussion – it would make a lot of sense for someone who is paying a lot of money for a Christmas Day game to want the best possible results which would mean it would make sense to involve the Dallas Cowboys.

That is fair, is it not? If we were collectively running a business that was in the interest of acquiring the league’s Christmas Day games, wouldn’t we want to do everything we could to ensure that the Cowboys – the league’s biggest ratings draw – were playing in it?

We know that Jerry Jones is never shy to avoid having his team serve as a trailblazer of sorts and the Cowboys have yet to appear in a game that exclusively streamed (not that there have been a ton of them). A big reason for this is likely the loss that it would be for another potential network (FOX, CBS, NBC, etc.), but that would seemingly serve as more reason why it would make logical sense to involve them.

In case you are curious it has been 14 years since the Cowboys last played on Christmas Day, so while it is not necessarily something that happens all of the time, there has been enough of a gap to where it would make sense based on the way the league does things like this historically.

The Cowboys visited the Arizona Cardinals on Christmas night back in the lost season of 2010. Jon Kitna started at quarterback. Stephen McGree ultimately came in for some work. It was… memorable to say the least.

We will see if the league does wind up coming to terms with Netflix for their Christmas Day games and if so whether or not the Cowboys are involved. Nothing is ever off the table for Dallas.