King: 2021 schedule would have Cowboys traveling to New England for 17th game
If you had gotten a dollar for every time the NFL’s 2020 campaign was referred to as “a season unlike any other,” well, you’d be sitting on Dak Prescott-level money right now. But the fact is, 2021 is shaping up to be pretty unprecedented, too.
Noted insider Peter King of NBC Sports offers a preview of some of the new scheduling wrinkles that will affect the Cowboys – plus every other team in the league- next season in the latest edition of his Football Morning in America column.
While a 17th regular season game on each team’s slate was approved in theory last March, it hasn’t been been officially given the greenlight for the upcoming season. King expects that to happen, though, and says “TV partners and NFL schedulers are working under the assumption” that each team will play one extra game starting in 2021.
By virtue of the agreed-upon divisional rotation and final standings, the Cowboys have known that should a 17th regular season game be added in 2021, they would be paired with the New England Patriots. What hasn’t been announced is which team would host that still-hypothetical game.
King reports that he’s “hearing it’s likely” that since the extra games are all AFC-versus-NFC matchups, one conference would play host this year, and then the other conference would be the home team next year. This keeps things fair within each conference, King points out, with no chance of “three NFC East teams playing eight at home and the fourth playing nine at home.”
It’s speculated that the AFC would be granted hosting duties in 2021, meaning the Cowboys would travel to Foxborough this season, in a game that King ranks in his top five for the season. “If it’s not a good game,” he predicts, “at least it’ll get ratings out the wazoo.”
As noted by CBS Boston, “the Patriots hosted the Cowboys in 2019, a game which the Patriots won 13-9. The Patriots have won six straight games against the Cowboys, dating back to 1999. Prior to that, the Patriots went 0-7 vs. Dallas from 1971-96.”
The scheduling plan King predicts would leave the Cowboys with their normal eight home games in 2021, but nine in 2022.
So what does that extra game in the regular season do to the overall calendar? There’s almost no chance the season would start any earlier; the post-Labor Day kickoff seems set in stone. And the league appears unlikely to add a second bye week for teams, King writes, meaning “17 games in 18 weekends.”
The push, then, will come in the postseason. Super Bowl LVI is currently supposed to be played on February 6, 2022 at SoFi Stadium; while game officials in Los Angeles have not yet been contacted about moving that date, King believes the move will be made to leave the all-important week in between the conference championship games and the Super Bowl. “So that adds up to Feb. 13,” King says, “which would be the latest Super Bowl in history.”
Also regarding the playoffs, King thinks “it’s somewhere between 50-50 and very likely” that fans will get a wild-card game on Monday night following the 2021 season. Last year’s college football title game being played on the Monday of wild card weekend forced the NFL to stage tripleheaders on both Saturday and Sunday, which proved to be overload for even the most rabid fans. Next year’s schedule crowns a collegiate champion before the NFL’s postseason begins, so it’s thought we could see “two [wild card] games on Saturday, three on Sunday, and one on Monday.”
Finally, with December 25, 2021 falling on a Saturday, King feels there’s a strong possibility that fans will be presented with two games that day. “The league was encouraged by the big rating for last season’s Saints-Vikings game (20.1 million viewers on FOX, the highest non-Sunday rating for the network in more than two years),” he points out. The NFL looking to nibble away at even more of the NBA’s traditionally huge chunk of the holiday’s sports-watching pie seems entirely plausible.
Who knows? It could even be a very Cowboys Christmas in 2021.
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