The NFL’s 100th season happens this year. The league’s 100th anniversary happens next year, in September.
And the league will be staging in Canton, Ohio a multi-day centennial celebration in September 2020. But the celebration won’t include a regular-season game at Tom Benson Hall of Fame Stadium in Canton.
Peter King of Football Morning in America reported Monday that the rumored possibility of a Canton game played on the 100th anniversary of the league’s launch, September 17, 2020, will not happen.
The Hall of Fame, per King, wanted the Bears to “host” a game that night, given their status as one of the two remaining original NFL teams. King notes that the dramatically reduced gate -- with space for only 25,000 paying customers -- likely was a factor. Throw in the sacrifice of a home game by the Bears along with a short-week trip to Canton for the contest, and it makes sense for the Bears to opt for advancing their 2020 interests in the present over paying excessive homage to 1920.
It’s a shame, but the NFL didn’t become the billion-dollar behemoth that it is by making bad business decisions. And it would definitely be a bad business decision to deliberately choose to shrink the paid attendance at an NFL game from more than 60,000 to less than half of that.