The NFL on Tuesday night? Would there be viewer interest?

The National Football League’s recent history of playing games on Tuesday will not take long to cover.

The last time the league played on Tuesday came 10 years ago when a scheduled Sunday game between the Vikings and Eagles was postponed for two days because of the prospect of a winter storm hitting Philadelphia and concern about potential travel conditions. (Per the New York Times: “As much as 18 inches had been expected at the stadium, but there was only 12.”) The Eagles were favored by 14.5 points at kickoff but behind rookie quarterback Joe Webb in his first career start, the Vikings beat the Michael Vick-led Eagles, 24-14 on the night of Tuesday, Dec. 28, 2010.

In order to find the second most recent Tuesday game, you have to go back 74 years. The 1946 season opener for the Boston Yanks and New York Giants at Braves Field in Boston was rescheduled to a Tuesday due to heavy rain. On Tuesday, Oct 1, 1946, New York fullback Merle Hapes scored two touchdowns for the Giants in a 17-0 win over Boston. Congrats to those who had Hapes in for fantasy that week.

You have now been updated on Tuesday NFL football since 1946, which brings us to this Tuesday when CBS is scheduled to air the Bills-Titans at 7 p.m. ET in Nashville. The infrequency of Tuesday as an NFL game date got me thinking: How feasible would a modified Tuesday Night Football package — or even a one-off each season — be for the league and its media partners? Would there be viewer interest? Could you get a buy-in from the players? Personally, I think it would be an interesting experiment, one of the few days of the week with no tradition of NFL Football. That feels like an opportunity. To be clear, the league told The Athletic this week that it hasn’t come up in any discussion.

“It hasn’t been seriously explored but factors for consideration would be viewer appetite, competitive issues and whether it dilute the presentation of games,” said Brian McCarthy, the NFL’s vice president of communications.

Let’s start with the viewer interest part. Tuesday is a strong night of the week for television consumption. In primetime there’s no real difference between Sunday through Thursday. Friday and Saturday nights are where television consumption drops. So I think the interest would be there, especially for the novelty of it. (Last week’s Thursday Night Football game — an excellent matchup between the Bears and Buccaneers — drew 14.7 million viewers on Fox and the NFL Network.)

The competitive part would have to be worked out. You would need to give teams ample rest after the game, and I think the only way to get the players to buy in would be with guaranteed byes the following week after a Tuesday game. But that might not be enough.

“I think first and foremost players are creatures of habit — schedules scripted down to the minute for players, although these aren’t normal times with COVID,” said ESPN NFL analyst Damien Woody, who played 12 seasons in the NFL with the Patriots, Lions and Jets and won three Super Bowls. “My guess would be that players wouldn’t be in favor of Tuesday Night Football simply because that’s usually their day off and players don’t like to deviate from the norm. Personally I was always a play at 1 p.m. on Sunday type of guy, so playing on a Tuesday wouldn’t play well with me.”

Would it dilute the presentation of other games? I don’t know. The pandemic has shifted the sports television landscape, and we don’t know what the long-term implications are of moving certain sports off their usual spot in the calendar or playing games on non-traditional days. What is clear is that the package would create a lot of money for the league and players.

“Several times over past decades, the NFL has been able to unlock substantial value by shifting Sunday afternoon games to other days and time slots, like Sunday night, Monday night and Saturday,” said Lee Berke, a longtime sports TV consultant, who has clients across NFL, MLB, NBA. NCAA, NHL and NASCAR among other sports. “Tuesday Night Football could offer up the same result — the evening’s most-watched show during what usually is a relatively quiet night for sports. With an extra week’s worth of games starting next season, the NFL could establish Tuesday Night as a franchise package, generating substantial ratings and sponsorship sales, multiplatform distribution, and due to a very competitive marketplace, an annual rights fee that could approach between $1.5-$2 billion. There are some challenges to be sure, particularly in terms of scheduling and getting teams ready for Sunday games after they play on Tuesday. Still, the addition of a 17th game and an additional bye week could make all of this more manageable, along with the potential of an enormous bump in rights fees just for shifting one game from Sunday to Tuesday.”

Tom McCarthy will call the unique game for CBS on Tuesday. I asked him over the weekend what he thought of the prospect of this being the start of something beyond his crew.

“I’m from the generation of Sunday and Monday Night Football,” said the 53-year-old Tom McCarthy, who serves as the play-by-play announcer for the Phillies’ television broadcasts. “That’s what I grew up on. When the addition was made for Sunday night and eventually for Thursday night, I was intrigued by both as a fan. I do think that the machine that is the NFL could work on any given night. Now, is there a buy-in from the players and owners needed to make this a little easier from a scheduling standpoint? Probably. But I think the NFL is at a level now and has been for the last five years that you can put it on any night during the week and people will watch it. So if they are looking for another night to kind of captivate the audience, I think Tuesday will work.”

The Ink Report

Fox had a quality sequence for Alex Smith’s return to football with 2:00 remaining in the first half of the Rams’ 30-10 win over Washington.

It started with narration from play by play announcer Brandon Gaudin as Smith came in for Washington. “Boy, Alex Smith hasn’t played, or even been active since that gruesome leg injury in 2018. Had 17 surgeries in nine months, amputation at one point was a possibility,” Gaudin said. “And now 693 days later here he is coming back on an NFL football field.”

That was followed by a quick camera shot of Washington quarterback Kyle Allen heading to the locker room with an injury, followed by an immediate shot of Smith’s wife, Elizabeth, and their children sitting in the stands watching. Analyst Daryl Johnston then told viewers Smith had not been hit in practice since returning to the active roster. There was also a quick report from Pam Oliver on Allen unlikely to return. It set up a lot of drama to end the half. Credit producer Eric Mandia and director Artie Kempner for a nice sequence.

1a. CBS had its top broadcast team doing Dallas (1-3) and Giants (0-4) given the viewership potential of the game (Dallas is the NFL’s top viewership draw) as well as the logistics of Tony Romo being able to work from his hometown. That paid off during the frantic last minute in an absolutely thrilling 37-34 win. The game felt bigger given who was calling it and while he was criticized by some on social media for wondering if Dak Prescott’s ankle injury was a cramp, I saw it as a broadcaster who was hoping for the best. Said Romo, upon the game’s conclusion: “1-3 and an 0-4 — and that was about as an exciting game as you can ask.”

Replied Jim Nantz: “It was a nutty game, for sure.”

1b. The enhanced audio for NFL games remains significantly too high at times — at least for this viewer. Late in the first quarter of the Washington-Rams game, it was impossible to hear rules analyst Dean Blandino explain a call over the enhanced audio.

1c. Through four weeks of this NFL season, viewership is down about 10% from 2019, per Sports Business Daily managing editor Austin Karp.

2019: 16.3 million average viewers per game

2020: 14.6 million average viewers per game

2. The next Sports Media Podcast will feature Sports Business Daily media writer John Ourand and Turner Sports NBA analyst Stan Van Gundy. ESPN NBA reporter Malika Andrews was the previous guest.

Here’s the link to listen and subscribe.

2a. The 2020 WNBA Finals between Seattle Storm and Las Vegas Aces averaged 440,000 viewers for the three-game series, up 14% over the five-game 2019 WNBA Finals (381,000).

2b. Raw stuff from Lakers forward Danny Green during a media press conference.

Danny Green on the fans who've made death threats against him & his fiancé after his missed shot: "I hope they're that passionate about voting, or injustice for these people who deserve justice – we'll get some better change in the country." Green calls himself "an easy target." pic.twitter.com/F68MgZnpNx

— Rachel Nichols (@Rachel__Nichols) October 11, 2020

3. Non-sports pieces of note

• This is one of the most powerful and honest things I have read in 2020. No overselling. It will make you think about your own place in the universe. By Jennifer B. Calder. He Thought We’d Be ‘Better Off.’

• Via Amy Thompson of Smithsonian Magazine: NASA Just Sent a New $23 Million Space Toilet to the International Space Station:

• Via The Daily Meal: The 101 Best Burgers in America.

• A 19th-century baseball player fought for Black suffrage — and was killed for it. By Chris Lamb of The Washington Post.

• Don’t Give Up on America. By Marilynne Robinson of the New York Times.

• By Heather Murphy of The New York Times. The wealthy want to escape the pandemic to a private, isolated paradise. The people who sell islands have to explain: It’s complicated.

• Lessons for the Next Pandemic—Act Very, Very Quickly. By Betsy Morris of The Wall Street Journal.

• They Came for My Father Nearly 30 Years Ago. It Still Haunts Me. By Hawra al-Nadawi, for the New York Times.

• Nicole Kidman Leans Into the Pain. By David Marchese of New York Times Magazine.

• A mentally ill man, a heavily armed teenager and the night Kenosha burned. By Robert Klemko and Greg Jaffe of Washington Post.

• How “Am I the Asshole?” Created a Medium Place on the Internet. By Tove K. Danovich of The Ringer.

• Via John Woodrow Cox of The Washington Post: Only one of their children survived Sandy Hook. Now school posed a new threat: The virus.

• The Inside Story of MacKenzie Scott, the Mysterious 60-Billion-Dollar Woman. By Stephanie Clifford.

• The Forbes Investigation: How The SAT Failed America.

• An Arrest in Canada Casts a Shadow on a New York Times Star, and The Times. By Ben Smith of the New York Times.

• America’s postal service is a rural lifeline and it’s in jeopardy. By Sarah Smarsh for National Geographic.

• ‘The Joy of the Discovery’: An interview with Jennifer Doudna, winner of the 2020 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. By Claudia Dreifus of The New York Review of Books.

• This is the inside story of how Rinaldo Nazzaro built the Base, a neo-Nazi terror organization—and how it all came apart. By Mack Lamoureux, Ben Makuch and Zachary Kamel of Vice.

• What do we really know about Bonnie and Clyde and their legacy in Dallas. By Sarah Hepola of Texas Highways.

• You won’t soon forget this. As told to Eli Saslow of The Washington Post: On dismissing, denying, contracting and spreading the coronavirus.

Sports pieces of note:

• Via Jeff Goodman of Stadium. Wichita State’s Gregg Marshall punched a player, choked an assistant coach and directed racial and ethnic slurs at players, Stadium’s six-month investigation revealed. School has launched investigation.

• A farewell to the NBA bubble after three grueling and exhilarating months. By Ben Golliver of The Washington Post.

• Drafted No. 2 overall by the Los Angeles Kings, Quinton Byfield made history. He becomes the highest-drafted Black player ever in NHL history. This is the story of his journey. By The Athletic’s Ryan S. Clark.

• The IU 10’s fight for racial justice in ’60s Indiana. By Bob Kravitz of The Athletic.

• From Michael Rosenberg of Sports Illustrated. There were 12 linebackers on USC’s 1989 depth chart. Five died before age 50.

(Photo: Frederick Breedon / Getty Images)