Some believe it’s time for real action regarding making the Monday after the Super Bowl a holiday.
According to Chris Cwik of Yahoo Sports and Chantz Martin of Fox News, Tennessee State Senator London Lamar and Representative Joe Towns Jr., both Democrats, introduced a bill Wednesday that would replace the Columbus Day holiday on the calendar with a day off for the Monday following the Super Bowl in the state.
Cwik’s piece shared a link to a story from Challenger, Gray & Christmas posted last February that said a 2021 survey found that “16.1 million Americans reported they were likely not going to work on the Monday after the Super Bowl.”
Interestingly, this development happened in Tennessee less than two full weeks ahead of a Super Bowl that will feature the Kansas City Chiefs facing the Philadelphia Eagles. That aside, it’s hardly a secret the NFL and fans would prefer for every Super Bowl Sunday to occur over Presidents’ Day weekends. That’s not always possible with the current scheduling format and could be taken off the table, entirely, sooner rather than later.
Dallas Cowboys owner and general manager Jerry Jones make it known in December he’s in favor of shifting to a schedule of 18 regular-season games and two to three preseason contests per team each year. If the league and NFL Players Association can agree to another schedule expansion before 2025, they presumably could add a 19th regular-season game before 2030. Assuming the NFL continues to avoid starting seasons over Labor Day weekends when fans around the country are away from televisions, a 19-game/21-week campaign (with two bye weeks for each club) theoretically could run through the end of February or even into March.
Chris Chase mentioned for USA Today in 2013 that a petition asking the White House to declare Super Bowl Monday a national holiday fell well short of the required amount of signatures needed for a response at that time. Perhaps one state could forever change the way Americans celebrate the country’s biggest television event of each year.
