This has a simple solution: just wait until they inevitably extend the season to 18 games, and then the Super Bowl will end up on Presidents’ Day weekend by default.
Feels like the NFL should just bump back the start of the season by a week in the meantime. No one really cares when the season starts, I don't think, and I'm sure the league would love for the Superbowl to be a de facto federal holiday..
The NBA used to claim Christmas Day for itself but in the past couple years the NFL has just decided to go ahead and take it over. I don't think the NFL cares what the NBA wants at this point.
The NFL also used to not play MNF when it conflicted with a World Series game. When they ended it, they suffered no adverse consequences. They'll play whenever they want to and are able to.
Why is that inevitable? The teams already lose many members to injuries at the regular season’s current length. Extending that, even by one game, would only mean more injuries! I doubt anyone is going to want a post-season full of third stringers, so I think an extended season is far from inevitable.
My friend and I agree; for a league that loves to wrap itself in the American flag at every opportunity* (flyovers, celeb musician star spangled banner, military family reunions that are not as wholesome as they seem**) it’s extremely odd the NFL hasn’t found a way to have the game on Presidents’ Day weekend.
I’ll just say this. If there is a surefire way to boost Biden’s chance at reelection it’s coming out in support of the Super Bowl on Presidents’ Day weekend.
* There’s real reasons kneeling for NFL national anthems would have more impact than almost any other venue. Number 1 is it’s (by far) the most popular cultural phenomenon in America. But number 2 is the patriotism the NFL has very distinct right wing flavor.
** I’m quite certain a number of those military reunions were for GOP candidates for office. Not surprising for ownership group that I think to a man big GOP donors.
“Honestly, I have no idea exactly how you measure something like that. We had different people in and out of our house at different times.”
The Nielsen ratings are based on a metric called “average minute audience” — that is, the estimated average number of people watching in any given minute. The numbers reported immediately after the game are based on tvs/cable boxes/streaming apps that can directly measure the numbers of minutes watched. The number will increase in the coming weeks as they get surveys back to include sampled “out of home” (people watching at bars and parties) and “over the air” (people watching on non-trackable devices like antennas) numbers. Not an exact science, but they do try to account for your scenario.
My friend and I are convinced that both sports ratings and cable news ratings are wildly undercounting true viewing figures. And our biggest reason is bars. I really don’t think it’s possible to count people watching sports and cable news at small businesses. Like right now, I’m sitting at JFK airport and ESPN is on my screen. Like how the heck do you capture that.
And as loathe as I am to admit this, I suspect actual Fox News ratings are underreported. I think most of you will nod your head but Fox News is constantly playing at all sort of business I go to (not just restaurants). Given political affiliation of most small business owners, not surprising.
Right and definitely helps. But also likely speaks to deficiencies in Nielson ratings generally. I dunno, I kind of feel like we should be on the cusp of a soundscan revolution like happened with music circa 1990
It seems pretty clear the NFL doesn’t want the superbowl on a three (or four) day weekend. They can read a calendar and could easily schedule it Presidents’ Day if they wanted. Your trip to Texas is probably a good example of why they don’t put it on a long weekend. I think you’d get fewer casual viewers if it was an easier weekend to travel.
"People want to stretch those last, lazy days of summer.
That’s why the NFL has decided that this Sunday and Monday (September 3-4) will be the last time that it opens its season on Labor Day weekend.
Beginning with Labor Day, 2001, NFL fans will be able to enjoy the unofficial "end of summer" at the beach, in the country or at the barbecue, and then kick off fall with the opening of the NFL season on the weekend after Labor Day."
====
That said, if they want 18 games, which I believe they do, they either have to play on either Labor Day weekend, Presidents' Day weekend, or get rid of the extra week between conference championships and the Super Bowl.
Interesting that college football doesn’t seem to care (although I suppose it seems more trip-oriented than the NFL, in that I’d guess the average fan attending a CFB game comes from farther away than the average fan attending an NFL game).
Yep. Especially for the crowd fond of calling it “sportsball” and who enjoy bragging about how they only watch for the commercials or because their friend/spouse made them go.
Anyways, seems the better solution would be to just start it earlier on Sunday for the East Coasters.
I don’t think it’s that clear. The Super Bowl only moved to the 2nd weekend in Feb when the season was extended to 17 games in 2021.
The Super Bowl was consistently in January in recent times. Moving the Super Bowl back an additional week would mean adding another week of play or an additional bye week in the season. These would need to be negotiated with the players. Or adding another week of rest between the conference championship games and Super Bowl.
It’s the mattress store cartel that has its thumb on the NFL. No way the pillow top mafia would allow the Super Bowl to take place on their big sales weekend.
I would guess that the mattress industry mainly benefits from information asymmetry and some consumer peculiarities, not necessarily any particular government-enforced policies.
Most consumers don't really understand all the costs that go into a mattress. Like with textiles, they don't really understand all the minutiae of actual quality production, and those minutiae don't necessarily reveal themselves quickly. Consumer preferences are highly variegated, contingent, and individualized, so it's difficult for consumers to differentiate and select products -- but even when they *can* do this, that simply makes them more captive to sellers' demands. They also don't purchase mattresses very often. Since they're already expensive and time-consuming/bulky to deal with, consumers are reluctant to return them if they're unsatisfied, limiting competition. Mattress stores may be numerous, but they're also reasonably-well spread-out enough that consumers probably hate shopping around. Also, Co-Pilot brings up the salient point that the used mattress market isn't very strong, because consumers are squicked out by hygeine concerns -- it's really difficult to WASH a mattress, after all, and no one in the industry has a huge incentive to make that convenient.
I'd bet that the industry probably understands most of these dynamics, and happily reinforces them -- by, say, deliberately designing multiple product lines. And we even see with newcomers like Casper that the simple fact of variegated consumer demand means that even the best-intentioned manufacturers who start with simple product lineups are incentivized to variegate their product lines.
Spectator sports on TV is the one huge advantage we indeed have.
But on this subject, it's funny, I first woke up at 6 AM but then remembered of the three day weekend and slept a couple extra hours, thinking there would be a rerun of a SB article like there usually is on a federal holiday. Instead, I see a short new post in which I actually had several points to make, but of course they all got sniped already:
--The Super Bowl will eventually be on Presidents' Day weekend when the owners push for an 18th game in the next CBA in 2030.
--The Super Bowl should have been on Saturday a long time ago for people to enjoy a day of recovery.
--The CFB championship is on Monday only because the NFL already dominated with their playoffs on Saturday and Sunday.
--The Super Bowl will be on Valentine's Day in 2027 and that will cause all kinds of drama.
My kids’ school has SuperBowl Monday off but they have school today. The district switched them because attendance is historically low on SuoerBowl Monday anyway, so they built it into the calendar. Also, my husband teaches at a school that also had a student holiday last Monday AND has one this Monday. Teachers have to still come. On that note, please write about Bandera ISD’s decision to move to a four-day school week. You can do some on the ground reporting in San Antonio. Happy President’s Day!
Oh, I am curious about this too. Lots of staff and families seem to love it, but I wonder about tiredness, especially among the younger kids, with a longer day. As a patient, I hate the 10 and 12 hour shifts many medical staff have at hospitals knowing how mentally tired I can be at the end of an 8 hour day.
One of my most strongly held half-baked idea is that the United States needs to add more public holidays as a matter of public policy.
More time off is good for people's quality of life, by aligning the days people have off you'll do more to encourage socializing, friendship, gimic business sales, community festivals, and family trip taking (all good for the economy and society). Adding more public holidays is a stealthy way to implement a minimum PTO/Vacation Days for workers in a package that is more likely to be passed by our legislature. I'm not saying we should not have minimum paid time off, but it'll be easier to get "Apollo 11 Day" passed than a sweeping labor-welfare bill all the way through; also, if all my friends were forced to take the same days off it would be better for our bowling together activities, it solves a collective action problem of when to hang out and prevents people from blowing their PTO on hungover Mondays. Additionally the USA already lags behind the rest of the world in minimum number of holidays (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_number_of_public_holidays) - I'm not suggesting we try at top Nepal's 35 holidays, but surely we can match our peers in western Europe and Afghanistan.
The only challenge is figuring out which days to make holidays, surely our short history has a few more events to commemorate (ideally during the holiday drought between February and late May)
"The only challenge is figuring out which days to make holidays, surely our short history has a few more events to commemorate (ideally during the holiday drought between February and late May)"
Literally my only critique of Juneteenth was that you already had national holidays that probably a majority of people have off just six weeks apart on either side of it (Memorial Day -> Independence Day), while you have a period almost four and a half months long in the January to May time period with no national holidays other than Presidents' Day, which is rarely a holiday for employees outside the government, educational (partial - my kids aren't off today), and banking sectors.
There is nothing wrong with having stacking holidays, ideally there should be a week or two where there are more than one holidays so that people can chain those into a longer vacation (Thanksgiving/Black Friday... which some people get off...). Step 1 is to find the right days, but the important Step 2 is making it so non-public service employers give these days off and service jobs pay overtime.
I'm going to be thinking about what days we should add for this afternoon's thread: off the top my head - May Day (International Friendship Day!), Earth Day (National Park Day!), Constitution Day, St. Patricks Day (Immigrant Day!), February 29th (Leap Day!), Election Day, Christmas Eve.
The socially and politically weaker will have to be the one one make the adjustment. Which means that the Federal government should move President's Day one week ahead.
Officially the holiday is still called Washington's Birthday, so we'll have to get looser with when we celebrate. But it's not like we've haven't retconned other people's birthdates before, oh my no...
RE: "inexplicable closure days that are a regular feature of the public school calendar"
In the UK, these are officially called INSET Days (IN-Service Education and Training), and they're days that the schools are open but the students don't attend, so the teachers can do their CPD requirements. Boomers (and older) never had them when they were students, but we GenXers called them "Baker Days", as they were introduced by the then Education Secretary Kenneth Baker. They tend to fall at all sorts of inconvenient times, as each school picks the days separately, so they may pick a day when there's a conference that several teachers want to attend, and they are not scheduled nearly as far in advance as full closures.
All full closures of a school are part of one of the six annual school vacations, all of a minimum length of one week, unless the school is unable to align all the national public holidays ("bank holidays") with the annual vacations, in which case they can close for a bank holiday. Most schools in England only ever close for one bank holiday (May Day) as they can generally manipulate the vacations to include the others. Scottish (30 November), Welsh (1 March) and Northern Irish (17 March and 12 July) generally have to have their national days as additional bank holidays.
Anyway, I agree that it's silly that there's a Sunday evening event that is always a week before a public holiday. Either the event should move a week later, or the public holiday should move a week earlier, or else the event should be either Sunday afternoon or Saturday night. I suppose the problem with Sunday afternoon is that makes it Sunday lunchtime on the West Coast and Sunday morning in Hawaii.
As a Brit who usually watches until the end of the halftime show and then goes to bed, this was a very exciting superbowl and I was completely useless for work the next day.
In all the major American sports, the worst part of all the all-star festivities is the all-star game. The side events are always much more fun because the players have a good time and aren't worried about injuries. As a fan I just want them to drop the game and do more skills competitions (IMO the Homerun Derby is the perfect all-star event). NFL has moved this direction and it is just better.
Exactly. The NBA and other leagues are just behind the NFL on this by a few years, and they'll be with them soon enough. I caught a few minutes of this one when it started while I was waiting for my meal, and I quickly laughed and came to the conclusion that they were not going to play any defense at all.
This is likely the last great act of defense we'll ever see in an all star game. RIP Sean.
Why even do we do all-star things? I am a simple country bumpkin who prefers his sports at the collegiate level (fuck blank state! go u blank!), but I have never understood the appeal.
It made much more sense before the rise of TV and the rise of player salaries. People could see stars they otherwise would not have been able to, and it also created extra revenue to the players that at the time could override the tradeoff of increased injury risk.
In theory, it makes sense that people want to watch the best-of-the-best directly compete. Teams are composed entirely of elites and eschew the scrubs that fill out the roster of most fans' local clubs.
In practice, the players aren't incentivized to play as hard since the result "doesn't count" (but injuries do), plus half the fun of being a fan is the local aspect, so it just isn't as compelling a competition.
I guess one comment I have that hasn't been sniped yet regards Matt's concern about potential decline of in-person socialization. Most people seem to blame this on screens, starting with television and currently culminating in smart phones and social media. But the Super Bowl is the ultimate screen event, and the NFL are the kings of screens. (And I'm guilty as charged there, I know I'm watching it on autumn Sundays!) Yet the NFL has also found a way to make its screen events super social in person. The Super Bowl is the overwhelming example, but I'm also usually having people at my house or at other people's house for a handful of the regular season weekends too.
How does the NFL pull it off, and how could others? The only big thing I could think of is that because it's a live event, they still have to play on a structured, regular schedule, something that most entertainment is now freed from due to the rise of streaming. And there also isn't a strong norm about spoiling sports game results as there is with other entertainment. There's also the issue of entertainment being more diverse and thus more fractured as to what people watch and don't watch. The NFL is able to get enough widespread appeal, but will that always be the case?
NFL almost certainly solves this problem by adding an 18th regular season game soon. Also avoids the presently possible nightmare of the Super Bowl falling on VALENTINE'S DAY! (Quick way to lose the hopeless romantic Swiftie Demo the NFL just snagged)
Super Bowl is currently played on the Second Sunday in Feb (after nearly 20 years of it being the first Sunday.) Moving it to the third Sunday, President's day weekend, avoids the possibility for a Feb 14 SB which happens in 2027.
Slow Boring needs moar combat sports commentary. So far it's been over 36 hours and still no commentary from the SB team on Volkanovski getting knocked out and losing the featherweight title this weekend. Sad!
Fun fact: I have watched exactly one UFC event, visiting a friend who had gotten into combat sport. Nothing against it, just not my thing.
It just so happened to be the night that Rousey got her ass kicked. I had heard of her (I do not live under a rock), but the rest of the room was experiencing a very different event than I experienced.
This has a simple solution: just wait until they inevitably extend the season to 18 games, and then the Super Bowl will end up on Presidents’ Day weekend by default.
And this is exactly what they are targeting!
Feels like the NFL should just bump back the start of the season by a week in the meantime. No one really cares when the season starts, I don't think, and I'm sure the league would love for the Superbowl to be a de facto federal holiday..
The NBA All-Star Game would need to move then, and the NBA has claimed Presidents Day weekend first.
The NFL could still do it (and would win, they have way more viewers) but I think sports leagues try not to piss each other off.
The NBA used to claim Christmas Day for itself but in the past couple years the NFL has just decided to go ahead and take it over. I don't think the NFL cares what the NBA wants at this point.
The NFL also used to not play MNF when it conflicted with a World Series game. When they ended it, they suffered no adverse consequences. They'll play whenever they want to and are able to.
NFL had no qualms about pounding the other leagues into ratings oblivion at this point
A bump back would be Labor Day weekend, and see my comment downthread.
I think he meant back as in “toward the end of the year” - ie start the season the third weekend of September.
Ah, that would make more sense. That's a weird, contradictory tic in the English language.
Why is that inevitable? The teams already lose many members to injuries at the regular season’s current length. Extending that, even by one game, would only mean more injuries! I doubt anyone is going to want a post-season full of third stringers, so I think an extended season is far from inevitable.
The league has pushing for an 18-game season for many years and already got half way there. I agree with you, but it seems like only a matter of time.
My friend and I agree; for a league that loves to wrap itself in the American flag at every opportunity* (flyovers, celeb musician star spangled banner, military family reunions that are not as wholesome as they seem**) it’s extremely odd the NFL hasn’t found a way to have the game on Presidents’ Day weekend.
I’ll just say this. If there is a surefire way to boost Biden’s chance at reelection it’s coming out in support of the Super Bowl on Presidents’ Day weekend.
* There’s real reasons kneeling for NFL national anthems would have more impact than almost any other venue. Number 1 is it’s (by far) the most popular cultural phenomenon in America. But number 2 is the patriotism the NFL has very distinct right wing flavor.
** I’m quite certain a number of those military reunions were for GOP candidates for office. Not surprising for ownership group that I think to a man big GOP donors.
“Honestly, I have no idea exactly how you measure something like that. We had different people in and out of our house at different times.”
The Nielsen ratings are based on a metric called “average minute audience” — that is, the estimated average number of people watching in any given minute. The numbers reported immediately after the game are based on tvs/cable boxes/streaming apps that can directly measure the numbers of minutes watched. The number will increase in the coming weeks as they get surveys back to include sampled “out of home” (people watching at bars and parties) and “over the air” (people watching on non-trackable devices like antennas) numbers. Not an exact science, but they do try to account for your scenario.
My friend and I are convinced that both sports ratings and cable news ratings are wildly undercounting true viewing figures. And our biggest reason is bars. I really don’t think it’s possible to count people watching sports and cable news at small businesses. Like right now, I’m sitting at JFK airport and ESPN is on my screen. Like how the heck do you capture that.
And as loathe as I am to admit this, I suspect actual Fox News ratings are underreported. I think most of you will nod your head but Fox News is constantly playing at all sort of business I go to (not just restaurants). Given political affiliation of most small business owners, not surprising.
they changed the nielson ratings in 2020 with an adjustment that is supposed to account for viewership in public spaces like bars and airports. https://www.outkick.com/media-analysis/out-of-home-viewership-in-nielsen-ratings-is-looming-gamechanger-in-sports-business
In theory the nielson panelists will carry a little sound recorder that indicates what's on tv in the background whereever they are.
Right and definitely helps. But also likely speaks to deficiencies in Nielson ratings generally. I dunno, I kind of feel like we should be on the cusp of a soundscan revolution like happened with music circa 1990
It seems pretty clear the NFL doesn’t want the superbowl on a three (or four) day weekend. They can read a calendar and could easily schedule it Presidents’ Day if they wanted. Your trip to Texas is probably a good example of why they don’t put it on a long weekend. I think you’d get fewer casual viewers if it was an easier weekend to travel.
From an actual NFL news release: https://www.nfl.info/nflmedia/news/2000news/NFL-42.htm
"People want to stretch those last, lazy days of summer.
That’s why the NFL has decided that this Sunday and Monday (September 3-4) will be the last time that it opens its season on Labor Day weekend.
Beginning with Labor Day, 2001, NFL fans will be able to enjoy the unofficial "end of summer" at the beach, in the country or at the barbecue, and then kick off fall with the opening of the NFL season on the weekend after Labor Day."
====
That said, if they want 18 games, which I believe they do, they either have to play on either Labor Day weekend, Presidents' Day weekend, or get rid of the extra week between conference championships and the Super Bowl.
Interesting that college football doesn’t seem to care (although I suppose it seems more trip-oriented than the NFL, in that I’d guess the average fan attending a CFB game comes from farther away than the average fan attending an NFL game).
Fair, but at the same time Presidents' Day isn't a day off for most people other than government workers and bank employees.
but schools are closed which means a lot of families take trips.
Some schools, yes. (Neither of my kids' schools is closed today.) I'd want to see the percentage of school systems that close for Presidents' Day.
Bard (now Gemini) estimates 70-80% of schools are closed. These LLMs tend to be pretty good (accurate) at these types of questions.
Thanks!
Yep. Especially for the crowd fond of calling it “sportsball” and who enjoy bragging about how they only watch for the commercials or because their friend/spouse made them go.
Anyways, seems the better solution would be to just start it earlier on Sunday for the East Coasters.
I don’t think it’s that clear. The Super Bowl only moved to the 2nd weekend in Feb when the season was extended to 17 games in 2021.
The Super Bowl was consistently in January in recent times. Moving the Super Bowl back an additional week would mean adding another week of play or an additional bye week in the season. These would need to be negotiated with the players. Or adding another week of rest between the conference championship games and Super Bowl.
It’s not quite that easy to move it the game.
Well, they should nationalize the NFL anyway
It’s the mattress store cartel that has its thumb on the NFL. No way the pillow top mafia would allow the Super Bowl to take place on their big sales weekend.
God, I hate Big Mattress.
The term you want is “king size”
Add it to City of Trees' list of rentiers.
I will, but I also need to be enlightened on this one.
Huh, well, money laundering is more of a crime than getting the government to legally sanction one's rent seeking.
I would guess that the mattress industry mainly benefits from information asymmetry and some consumer peculiarities, not necessarily any particular government-enforced policies.
Most consumers don't really understand all the costs that go into a mattress. Like with textiles, they don't really understand all the minutiae of actual quality production, and those minutiae don't necessarily reveal themselves quickly. Consumer preferences are highly variegated, contingent, and individualized, so it's difficult for consumers to differentiate and select products -- but even when they *can* do this, that simply makes them more captive to sellers' demands. They also don't purchase mattresses very often. Since they're already expensive and time-consuming/bulky to deal with, consumers are reluctant to return them if they're unsatisfied, limiting competition. Mattress stores may be numerous, but they're also reasonably-well spread-out enough that consumers probably hate shopping around. Also, Co-Pilot brings up the salient point that the used mattress market isn't very strong, because consumers are squicked out by hygeine concerns -- it's really difficult to WASH a mattress, after all, and no one in the industry has a huge incentive to make that convenient.
I'd bet that the industry probably understands most of these dynamics, and happily reinforces them -- by, say, deliberately designing multiple product lines. And we even see with newcomers like Casper that the simple fact of variegated consumer demand means that even the best-intentioned manufacturers who start with simple product lineups are incentivized to variegate their product lines.
Those. Fuckers.
Those. Fuckers. - Abraham Lincoln
It's a good time to be a person experiencing Westerness. Even with the overtime I was home by 9.
Spectator sports on TV is the one huge advantage we indeed have.
But on this subject, it's funny, I first woke up at 6 AM but then remembered of the three day weekend and slept a couple extra hours, thinking there would be a rerun of a SB article like there usually is on a federal holiday. Instead, I see a short new post in which I actually had several points to make, but of course they all got sniped already:
--The Super Bowl will eventually be on Presidents' Day weekend when the owners push for an 18th game in the next CBA in 2030.
--The Super Bowl should have been on Saturday a long time ago for people to enjoy a day of recovery.
--The CFB championship is on Monday only because the NFL already dominated with their playoffs on Saturday and Sunday.
--The Super Bowl will be on Valentine's Day in 2027 and that will cause all kinds of drama.
Congratulations Ben!
My kids’ school has SuperBowl Monday off but they have school today. The district switched them because attendance is historically low on SuoerBowl Monday anyway, so they built it into the calendar. Also, my husband teaches at a school that also had a student holiday last Monday AND has one this Monday. Teachers have to still come. On that note, please write about Bandera ISD’s decision to move to a four-day school week. You can do some on the ground reporting in San Antonio. Happy President’s Day!
Oh, I am curious about this too. Lots of staff and families seem to love it, but I wonder about tiredness, especially among the younger kids, with a longer day. As a patient, I hate the 10 and 12 hour shifts many medical staff have at hospitals knowing how mentally tired I can be at the end of an 8 hour day.
One of my most strongly held half-baked idea is that the United States needs to add more public holidays as a matter of public policy.
More time off is good for people's quality of life, by aligning the days people have off you'll do more to encourage socializing, friendship, gimic business sales, community festivals, and family trip taking (all good for the economy and society). Adding more public holidays is a stealthy way to implement a minimum PTO/Vacation Days for workers in a package that is more likely to be passed by our legislature. I'm not saying we should not have minimum paid time off, but it'll be easier to get "Apollo 11 Day" passed than a sweeping labor-welfare bill all the way through; also, if all my friends were forced to take the same days off it would be better for our bowling together activities, it solves a collective action problem of when to hang out and prevents people from blowing their PTO on hungover Mondays. Additionally the USA already lags behind the rest of the world in minimum number of holidays (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_number_of_public_holidays) - I'm not suggesting we try at top Nepal's 35 holidays, but surely we can match our peers in western Europe and Afghanistan.
The only challenge is figuring out which days to make holidays, surely our short history has a few more events to commemorate (ideally during the holiday drought between February and late May)
"The only challenge is figuring out which days to make holidays, surely our short history has a few more events to commemorate (ideally during the holiday drought between February and late May)"
Literally my only critique of Juneteenth was that you already had national holidays that probably a majority of people have off just six weeks apart on either side of it (Memorial Day -> Independence Day), while you have a period almost four and a half months long in the January to May time period with no national holidays other than Presidents' Day, which is rarely a holiday for employees outside the government, educational (partial - my kids aren't off today), and banking sectors.
There is nothing wrong with having stacking holidays, ideally there should be a week or two where there are more than one holidays so that people can chain those into a longer vacation (Thanksgiving/Black Friday... which some people get off...). Step 1 is to find the right days, but the important Step 2 is making it so non-public service employers give these days off and service jobs pay overtime.
I'm going to be thinking about what days we should add for this afternoon's thread: off the top my head - May Day (International Friendship Day!), Earth Day (National Park Day!), Constitution Day, St. Patricks Day (Immigrant Day!), February 29th (Leap Day!), Election Day, Christmas Eve.
We get Cesar Chavez Day (April) and Lunar New Year (another Feb) off. Would love to see lunar new year in particular codified.
Ours is observed April 1st, provably to put a holiday in that four month stretch.
The socially and politically weaker will have to be the one one make the adjustment. Which means that the Federal government should move President's Day one week ahead.
Happy Family Day from Ontario.
Officially the holiday is still called Washington's Birthday, so we'll have to get looser with when we celebrate. But it's not like we've haven't retconned other people's birthdates before, oh my no...
RE: "inexplicable closure days that are a regular feature of the public school calendar"
In the UK, these are officially called INSET Days (IN-Service Education and Training), and they're days that the schools are open but the students don't attend, so the teachers can do their CPD requirements. Boomers (and older) never had them when they were students, but we GenXers called them "Baker Days", as they were introduced by the then Education Secretary Kenneth Baker. They tend to fall at all sorts of inconvenient times, as each school picks the days separately, so they may pick a day when there's a conference that several teachers want to attend, and they are not scheduled nearly as far in advance as full closures.
All full closures of a school are part of one of the six annual school vacations, all of a minimum length of one week, unless the school is unable to align all the national public holidays ("bank holidays") with the annual vacations, in which case they can close for a bank holiday. Most schools in England only ever close for one bank holiday (May Day) as they can generally manipulate the vacations to include the others. Scottish (30 November), Welsh (1 March) and Northern Irish (17 March and 12 July) generally have to have their national days as additional bank holidays.
Anyway, I agree that it's silly that there's a Sunday evening event that is always a week before a public holiday. Either the event should move a week later, or the public holiday should move a week earlier, or else the event should be either Sunday afternoon or Saturday night. I suppose the problem with Sunday afternoon is that makes it Sunday lunchtime on the West Coast and Sunday morning in Hawaii.
As a Brit who usually watches until the end of the halftime show and then goes to bed, this was a very exciting superbowl and I was completely useless for work the next day.
It may just be me, but this post is also a sneaky funny reminder/example about how the NBA All-Star game is meaningless this day and age.
211-186. I know they don't want to risk injury, but that's not a game, it's a shoot-around.
In all the major American sports, the worst part of all the all-star festivities is the all-star game. The side events are always much more fun because the players have a good time and aren't worried about injuries. As a fan I just want them to drop the game and do more skills competitions (IMO the Homerun Derby is the perfect all-star event). NFL has moved this direction and it is just better.
The baseball all-star game is actually pretty good because they don’t risk as much injury playing the game well.
Exactly. The NBA and other leagues are just behind the NFL on this by a few years, and they'll be with them soon enough. I caught a few minutes of this one when it started while I was waiting for my meal, and I quickly laughed and came to the conclusion that they were not going to play any defense at all.
This is likely the last great act of defense we'll ever see in an all star game. RIP Sean.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SC7Wx3zCiQo
Why even do we do all-star things? I am a simple country bumpkin who prefers his sports at the collegiate level (fuck blank state! go u blank!), but I have never understood the appeal.
It made much more sense before the rise of TV and the rise of player salaries. People could see stars they otherwise would not have been able to, and it also created extra revenue to the players that at the time could override the tradeoff of increased injury risk.
In theory, it makes sense that people want to watch the best-of-the-best directly compete. Teams are composed entirely of elites and eschew the scrubs that fill out the roster of most fans' local clubs.
In practice, the players aren't incentivized to play as hard since the result "doesn't count" (but injuries do), plus half the fun of being a fan is the local aspect, so it just isn't as compelling a competition.
You’re why we lost the Blue-Gray game!
I guess one comment I have that hasn't been sniped yet regards Matt's concern about potential decline of in-person socialization. Most people seem to blame this on screens, starting with television and currently culminating in smart phones and social media. But the Super Bowl is the ultimate screen event, and the NFL are the kings of screens. (And I'm guilty as charged there, I know I'm watching it on autumn Sundays!) Yet the NFL has also found a way to make its screen events super social in person. The Super Bowl is the overwhelming example, but I'm also usually having people at my house or at other people's house for a handful of the regular season weekends too.
How does the NFL pull it off, and how could others? The only big thing I could think of is that because it's a live event, they still have to play on a structured, regular schedule, something that most entertainment is now freed from due to the rise of streaming. And there also isn't a strong norm about spoiling sports game results as there is with other entertainment. There's also the issue of entertainment being more diverse and thus more fractured as to what people watch and don't watch. The NFL is able to get enough widespread appeal, but will that always be the case?
It should just be played on Saturday!
Viewership would be way down on a Saturday. Even college football which plays all of its game on Saturday switches to a Monday for its championship.
This is new and substantially (if maybe not majority) hated.
The college football championship is on a Monday night because they don’t want to compete with the NFL playoffs.
NFL almost certainly solves this problem by adding an 18th regular season game soon. Also avoids the presently possible nightmare of the Super Bowl falling on VALENTINE'S DAY! (Quick way to lose the hopeless romantic Swiftie Demo the NFL just snagged)
Do Valentines Day and Presidents Day ever coincide?
I think Prez day is the third Monday?
I guess if the third Monday is the 15th, then there would be a collision.
Super Bowl is currently played on the Second Sunday in Feb (after nearly 20 years of it being the first Sunday.) Moving it to the third Sunday, President's day weekend, avoids the possibility for a Feb 14 SB which happens in 2027.
Slow Boring needs moar combat sports commentary. So far it's been over 36 hours and still no commentary from the SB team on Volkanovski getting knocked out and losing the featherweight title this weekend. Sad!
[Imagine the animated GIF of Djimon Hounsou as Korath the Pursuer in GotG, Vol. I saying, "Who?" here]
Sounds like you haven't been keeping up with the latest UFC news. Sad!
As a friend of mine once asked me about the UFC- 'so who's beating up who these days?'
Fun fact: I have watched exactly one UFC event, visiting a friend who had gotten into combat sport. Nothing against it, just not my thing.
It just so happened to be the night that Rousey got her ass kicked. I had heard of her (I do not live under a rock), but the rest of the room was experiencing a very different event than I experienced.
Probably very different from what Rousey herself was experiencing!
In the spirit of crossing the red-blue divide you should encourage your followers to take a crack at watching the Daytona 500.