The Titans are the road team for a controversial regular-season game to be played in New York on Yom Kippur. The Titans also are the home team for a Christmas night game to be played in Nashville.
During a recent appearance on Sirius NFL Radio, the league’s senior V.P. of broadcasting, Howard Katz, explained the scheduling of a game on Christmas, which falls this year on a Friday.
“The thought process was it is a day when a lot of people are home in front of the television set,” Katz told Adam Schein and Solomon Wilcots of the Sirius Blitz. “The NBA plays five games that day. We thought it might be an opportunity for us to showcase our game on a day when a lot of people are at home.”
And the league opened the process up, to determine which teams would be willing to open the stadium on December 25.
“We canvassed the clubs to find out which teams might be interested and willing to host a Christmas Day game,” Katz said. “We wound up with four or five, maybe six, clubs that really wanted to host a game that day. We pursued the Tennessee Titans and worked things out with them. This was not done without a great deal of consultation with the club and they think it is a great opportunity for their fans. It’s late in the day. A lot of families have finished celebrating Christmas by that time. We hope it works. It is an experiment but we think it is a great opportunity for us on television and, as I said, the club was very much involved in the process of scheduling it.”
The selection of the Chargers to face the Titans in Tennessee on Christmas night might also help explain the league’s decision to pick the Raiders over the Chargers for the Thanksgiving Day game due to be played in Texas Stadium and televised on CBS. With the Cowboys hosting only two AFC teams this year, the Thanksgiving game had to involve one of the two AFC West squads as the road team.