The 2025 NFL season has been loaded with games on the Holidays, including Christmas and Thanksgiving. As the year winds down and Week 18 represents the final slate before the playoffs, some fans may be wondering what the schedule looks like as the calendar turns. Here’s what to know about the New Year’s Eve football options.
Are There NFL Games on New Year’s Eve for Week 18?
The NFL has been no stranger to packing the fall and winter holidays with intriguing slates of games, including triple-headers on Christmas and Thanksgiving this year, as well as an afternoon game on Black Friday. This has left many fans wondering if the league will feature a matchup on NYE as the calendar year prepares to change to 2026.
This will not be the case on the final day of 2025, as there are no NFL games scheduled until Saturday and Sunday of the first weekend in January. This also means that there will be no pro games on New Year’s Day either, but football fans can still view some live action with a different option on the two-day holiday.
There will be Bowl games for college football on both days, and most notably, all four games in the quarterfinals of the College Football Playoffs will take place across these two days. It kicks off with a standalone game on NYE between Ohio State and Miami.
The other three will be played as a triple-header on New Year’s Day, with no other Bowl games taking place, in a similar format to what the NFL schedule featured on Christmas and Thanksgiving.
For those wondering why the NFL passed on this particular holiday after loading up on the past two, most of this comes down to scheduling reasons in the final week of the 2025 season. Week 18 doesn’t include Thursday Night Football, or Monday Night Football for that matter, as all 16 games are played over the weekend. This is essentially to maintain the competitive balance between all teams entering the playoffs next week.
This means that fans will need to wait until Saturday afternoon for Week 18 to kick off, and it will begin with a matchup between the Carolina Panthers and Tampa Bay Buccaneers, with the NFC South division title still undecided and a playoff spot on the line. The Bucs once appeared to be running away with it, but now their season could be slipping away.
Baker Mayfield will look to bounce back after plummeting all the way down to 27th among quarterbacks in PFSN’s Impact Rankings. He has lost six of his past seven games, and another one would give the Panthers the divisional crown, while officially eliminating the Buccaneers from playoff contention.
