The NFL released its full 2022 regular-season schedule last week and for the New York Giants, they were limited to just one primetime game. That comes in Week 3 against the Dallas Cowboys on Monday night.
That’s good news, right? Wrong.
The New York Post reports that Giants co-owner John Mara is angry with the league for scheduling them on the Jewish holiday of Rosh Hashanah.
Mara, who is very family oriented and mindful of all holidays, specifically requested that the league not schedule them for a home game during the three-day Jewish event. Instead, what Mara got was Giants-Cowboys at MetLife Stadium on the night of September 26.
“I am well aware of that and not happy about it,” Mara told The Post. “I made my feelings known to the league as soon as I saw the schedule. We have always requested the league take the Jewish High Holy Days into consideration when formulating our schedule. Not sure why it happened this year.”
Teams often put in various schedule requests and most often they are granted. Sometimes they aren’t. In this case, the Giants were scheduled for Rosh Hashanah but also had their post-London bye week request granted. Instead of having their bye in Week 6 they’ll have it in Week 9.
“We are never able to accommodate every request,” Howard Katz, the NFL’s senior vice president of broadcasting, told The Post. “Mr. Mara absolutely this year and every year when the Jewish holidays fall on football days, he always asks to avoid the Jewish holidays. He certainly did. In this particular case we were not able to accommodate that request.
“He makes the same request every year. He’s always been extremely sensitive to his Jewish fans and goes out of his way every year to remind us and ask us to avoid Jewish holidays.”
Mara has been adamant about not playing on Jewish High Holy Days dating back to the late 1990s.The Giants, of course, have the largest Jewish fanbase in the entire league and now those fans will be unable to attend (and in most cases, watch) the Week 3 game.
“This is on me, this is not on John Mara. There are flaws in every schedule, we’ve never seen a perfect schedule. This was a flaw,” Katz said. “We were gonna play a Monday night game so Jewish fans somewhere were going to be conflicted and have to make decisions on whether or not to attend the game or watch the game or not. It turned out that it was really unfortunate that it happened in New York. But it was going to happen somewhere.”
MetLife Stadium will still be packed during that Monday night game, but the team’s Jewish fans will be elsewhere. And that is unfortunate.
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