The NFL is back to its old ways—this time kicking around the idea of adding a game to the Thanksgiving Eve time slot. It’s not as though the league doesn’t already dominate Thanksgiving weekend, because it does. But, unsurprisingly, the NFL is out for more—again at the expense of the NBA, NHL, and college basketball schedules.

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The NFL already owns Thanksgiving. Its three-game slate, beginning at noon Eastern, has become a staple of American culture. No other league even attempts to challenge it for that day. Thanksgiving belongs entirely to the NFL, and the league has never been shy about taking advantage of that reality.

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But Thanksgiving Eve is uncharted territory. Traditionally, that night belongs to the NBA and NHL regular-season schedules, with early-season college basketball tournaments sprinkled throughout the evening. For many fans, those tournament slates serve as the unofficial kickoff to the college basketball season, packed with non-conference matchups and holiday events. If the NFL moves forward with this idea, that space on the sports calendar will effectively disappear.

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And if this sounds familiar, it should. The NFL has been slowly expanding its reach across the sports calendar for years. Thursday Night Football, once considered a novelty, now occupies a time slot that long belonged to college football. The league has also planted its flag on Black Friday, scheduling games on a day that traditionally belonged to college football rivalry week and the start of holiday college basketball tournaments. What used to be shared territory on the sports calendar has steadily become NFL property.

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College football has historically been the biggest victim of the NFL’s expansion—first with Thursday Night Football creeping into traditional college time slots, and more recently with the league encroaching on Rivalry Weekend and overlapping with the College Football Playoff calendar. But in recent years, the NBA has taken the brunt of the NFL’s expansion.

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The league still hasn’t fully recovered from the NFL’s decision to infringe on what had long been the NBA’s showcase position atop the Christmas Day sports calendar.

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In 2024, the NFL made that reality even clearer when it announced it would schedule multiple games on Christmas Day, streaming games through Netflix. The NFL was willing to go out of its way to schedule games directly against Christmas Day programming.

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How did the NBA respond? Like every other league caught in the NFL’s path, it accepted the situation. The NBA understands that even its premium matchups are likely to take a backseat to something like Colts vs. Texans if the NFL chooses to occupy that window. There’s very little it can do beyond voicing mild frustration.

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At this point, the NFL has made one thing perfectly clear to the rest of the sports world: it is no longer concerned with being polite about where it places its games. The league isn’t interested in sharing the sports calendar. It’s interested in owning as much of it as possible.

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Moving forward, every other league may have to adopt the Major League Baseball postseason strategy: schedule games whenever the NFL is not playing. But with the league’s expansion creeping further into the calendar every year, it’s becoming increasingly unclear whether there will be anywhere left to hide.