The combatants aren’t good, and the deadline to make a decision draws closer. Will the NFL move out Cowboys-49ers?
The Dallas Cowboys’ 2020 season has been anything but enjoyable for the fanbase. As the team has plummeted to a 3-8 record and standing as good a chance as holding a top 3 pick as they do appearing in a playoff game, the campaign has been an abject failure. Injuries have mounted to epic proportions and the team has been unable to right the ship.
Perhaps the only team that has suffered similar catastrophic injuries across the board, and possibly moreso, have been the San Francisco 49ers. At 5-8, they are at the bottom of their own division and even though their efforts have been more gallant, they have barely been more fruitful. The fact that the two are scheduled to face each other in Week 15 wouldn’t normally register o the radar, except for the fact that it is a Sunday Night Football affair.
Will it remain that way? Since 2006, the league has had the ability to flex out the SNF matchup if it isn’t appealing to a broad audience. From Week 11, the league can swap out the predetermined matchup and replace it with something more enticing. They just need to decide 12 days in advance.
That means the deadline to flex out the December 20 matchup will be Tuesday, December 8. That means prior to the Cowboys taking on the Ravens in their moved-twice-matchup of Week 13.
As logical as it seems on the surface though, the game likely won’t be moved.
For one, the rules of what can and can’t be flexed make it difficult. The most intriguing matchup on the Week 15 schedule is a potential Super Bowl preview as the Kansas City Chiefs and New Orleans Saints collide.
However, each network is allowed to protect one game a week, and CBS would be pretty crazy to let that matchup get moved over to NBC, which hosts SNF. The late-afternoon games draw just as much of an audience as the night games, anyway. The rest of the Week 15 schedule isn’t nearly as appetizing.
There’s Patriots-Dolphins and Bears-Vikings and… that’s about it.
The NFL isn’t stupid. Please, hold your jokes for a moment. The league knows which organizations butter their bread when it comes to getting eyeballs on their TV screens. In a season where viewership is more important than ever thanks to COVID-19 culling the in-person crowd at every venue across the U.S., the Cowboys are even more important than they have been in the past.
The latest example was when more people watched the Dallas-Washington suckfest on Thanksgiving than any other game this season; over 33 million sets tuned in.
So while Cowboys-49ers doesn’t seem enthralling on the surface, tens of millions of people will still tune in. Partially because so many want to see the Cowboys struggle, they still bring in a contingent of league fans outside of Cowboys Nation. The 49ers have national cache as well, so even though it’s likely to be a matchup of sub-.500 teams, it’s probably a safe bet the game stays right where it is, in primetime.
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