It started with rumors, and those rumors were confirmed last week, the NFL will have a Monday Night Wild-Card Playoff Football game this season. The game will be the final of a three-day, six game opening round weekend schedule that will see the NFL break with tradition by having two teams play on Monday rather than either Saturday or Sunday. While some might tell you the move is for television ratings, I’m here to explain to you the real reason why Monday night Wild-Card Playoff Football is coming your way this January.
In years past, the NFL Wild-Card weekend featured four playoff games, two on the Saturday, and two on the Sunday after the regular season ended. The Monday after Wild-Card Weekend saw College Football crown their national champion. This year, with the expanded regular season schedule, College Football Playoffs will end the day after the NFL regular season, opening up the Monday Night time slot for the NFL to spread out their Wild-Card weekend over three days rather than compress it into two. This, along with the knowledge that NFL games do better ratings on Monday night than early Saturday afternoon is why some are saying the NFL is expanding their Wild Card Weekend.
Guess what, that may be part of the reason, but it is not the only reason, and it is also not the biggest reason. Because there’s one group that is jumping for joy that there is a Monday Night Wild-Card game.
Bookmakers!
Anyone who knows anything about how football gamblers think knows one thing every week: The Monday Night Football Game is a way for wagerers to cut their losses if they are behind or take a good week and make it a great one by winning a few extra bets. This has been true since the NFL added Monday Night Football into its regular season schedule, and will now become true during Wild-Card Weekend. And the reason why the NFL is so excited to do this is because of all their deals with online betting services that are each paying them millions of sponsorship dollars.
Think about it, with the 2021 NFL season ending on January 9th, Wild Card weekend falls under the new 18-week schedule the following week. This year, that weekend happens to be Martin Luther King, Jr. weekend, a great three-day weekend for people to take a trip to Las Vegas, and travel to see their favorite NFL team in the postseason. Or sit back, relax, and place a whole lot of bets on an NFL Wild-Card game on a day when they might have some winnings to reinvest or may need to make back some of their money from a bad weekend of NFL postseason gambling.
Make no mistake about it, this Monday Night Wild-Card playoff game is less for the network who gets to broadcast it and more about making the NFL bookmaking corporate sponsors/partners happy. Because for a league that only a few years ago denounced sports gambling, the NFL has certainly turned heel and embraced it for what it is: A way for them to make money.
Since we know that the NFL will sell its soul for the all mighty dollar, we should not be surprised that as soon as they could, they made their new sponsors happy by throwing BetMGM, Draft Kings, FanDuel and all the other places you can make a bet a juicy bone called a Monday Night Playoff Football.
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The Real Reason Monday Night Playoff Football Is Coming | TooAthletic.com
