When the league first deliberately leaked the possibility of staging a game on the night before Thanksgiving, it should have been obvious that it was happening. To make it happen, however, the NFL had to think outside the officially-licensed wine box.
With the ban on televising Friday night and Saturday games still in effect in November, the league couldn’t have the two Wednesday-before-Thanksgiving teams play on the preceding Saturday. The only option was to pick two teams emerging from their annual bye week.
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As explained once that possibility (or probability . . . or inevitability) hit the radar screen, this limits the bye for the two teams that get the Thanksgiving Eve assignment. For the Packers, who played at New Orleans the following Sunday, they’ll have more down time after their post-bye game than before it. The Rams, who host the Chiefs the ensuing Thursday night, will have a truncated bye, eight days off, and then the usual mini-bye following a Thursday night game. (That will give the Rams extra time to prepare for their rematch with the 49ers, which surely went over well with San Francisco coach Kyle Shanahan.)
Still, both the Packers and the Rams won’t have the usual, full-blown, once-per-year bye week. They’ll play 10 days (not 14 days) after their last game before the week off.
This will complicate the planning for their Thanksgiving Eve game. Under the labor deal, players must have at least four straight days off during the bye week.
Here’s the relevant portion of the Collective Bargaining Agreement, from Article 24, Section 2: “During any regular season bye week period occurring during the term of this Agreement, players will be given a minimum of four consecutive days off. Such four-day period must include a Saturday and a Sunday unless the Club is scheduled to play a game on the Thursday following the bye week, in which case players may be required to report to the Club on the Sunday preceding the Thursday game. In such an event, the four-day period shall be Wednesday through Saturday. Any injured player may be required to undergo medical or rehabilitation treatment during such four-day period provided that such treatment is deemed reasonably necessary by the Club’s medical staff.”
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The CBA, as written, doesn’t contemplate teams being scheduled to play on the Wednesday after the bye week. The most obvious adjustment would be to give the players Tuesday through Friday off, with a return to work on the Saturday before the Wednesday game.
If that’s how it goes, the players who are supposed to get a weekend off won’t even get one day from their bye-week weekend off. They’ll have their four-day break during the week, and they’ll be back to work on Saturday morning, with Saturday essentially becoming the first day of the traditional in-season preparation cycle for Sunday games. (In weeks with Sunday games, the practices usually happen on Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday. For a Wednesday game after the bye, the primary work days could be be Saturday, Sunday, and Monday.)
It’s currently unclear whether the NFL and NFL Players Association worked out a side deal to modify Article 24, Section 2. Ideally, the league would have gotten permission to deviate from the settled terms of the CBA before setting the game. If that didn’t happen, there’s a ready-fire-aim quality to the effort to find yet another standalone window.
At this point, whether the league secured advance authority to shrink the post-bye period doesn’t matter. The game has been set — and, more importantly, the right to televise the game has been awarded to Netflix. The overriding question becomes the windows that both the Packers and Rams players will have for their mandatory four-day break.
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For everyone on the outside, it doesn’t matter. For the players and their teams, it’s an important question. Will there be a “normal” workweek before the post-bye game, or will the players be back on Sunday for a truncated stretch of preparation for the first-ever game on the Wednesday before Thanksgiving?
If the question wasn’t addressed before the new window was selected and sold, it’s a question that needs to be resolved in the aftermath of the official schedule release.
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