Challenges created by the coronavirus pandemic give the NFL a prime opportunity to make a permanent fix to the annual date of the Super Bowl.
Rather than play the game in early February, as it is now, the league should make what has become an unofficial national holiday part of what is actually a national day of celebration. The Uniform Monday Holiday Act of 1971 moved this holiday to the third Monday, which can fall from Feb. 15 to 21, inclusive. A perfect home for the Super Bowl.
According to a survey by the Workforce Institute at Kronos, more than 11 million people thought Sunday’s Super Bowl 2020 required a day of recovery and set aside vacation time to take Monday off work. Another 5 million responded they secretly planned to call in “sick.”
And 1.5 million were perhaps so moved by the Kansas City Chiefs’ victory against the San Francisco 49ers that they couldn’t bring themselves to notify their bosses they wouldn’t be showing up to work.
There is a simple solution: Move the Super Bowl to the Sunday of Presidents’ Day weekend. Once and for all.
My esteemed colleague at For The Win, Andy Nesbitt, has long believed the game should be played on a Saturday, rather than a school night:
Here we are living in the year 2019, a time when just about everything is designed to make our lives feel more convenient and enjoyable.
With a touch of a few buttons on our phone we can get food delivered from an almost limitless number of restaurants, all with the added bonus of not having to talk with another human to get it done.
Things like Netflix, Amazon, Hulu, etc. have made it so we never have to leave the house to rent a movie, or even a TV show that we might have missed.
And yet here we are, in 2019, still having the Super Bowl on a Sunday night.
Which is neither that convenient nor as enjoyable as it could be.
The fix for this problem is really darn simple — move the game to Saturday.
The move to Presidents’ Day Sunday would accomplish the same result. Many people would have the Monday Presidents’ Day weekend off, anyway, and that would eliminate the deluge of sick-outs.
It would probably cause other sports to reconfigure their schedules — such as NASCAR — but this is the Super Bowl, so move over, the NFL is coming through.
The NFL is all about Sundays. It has been the primary day for pro football for decades. So, if the league doesn’t want to budge, it has the perfect place to audible: Presidents’ Day Sunday. When the schedule comes out, with its possible changes due to the pandemic, this would be a prudent way to buy some time to start the upcoming regular season.
And come the weekend of the Super Bowl, it would create a lot less stress for employees and employers on the day following the game.