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Who this is for and what you'll decide
This is for bar and restaurant owners and managers deciding whether to keep the bar open on Thanksgiving for football, or on New Year's Day for the bowl games, and for whoever will run the room if the answer is yes. By the end you should be able to make a clear call on each holiday, sketch a reduced-staff schedule, assign every screen ahead of time and run your TV checks early enough that nobody is on hold with support while the opening kickoff plays to a dark screen.
Holiday game days differ from an ordinary Sunday in three ways. Your staff pool is smaller, because people want the day with family. Your guests arrive with different plans: groups escaping a crowded house, travelers, people who don't cook, fans who'd rather watch with a crowd. And help is thinner if something breaks. Every recommendation below is built around those three facts.
Should your bar be open on Thanksgiving for football?
Start with evidence, not hope. If you opened last year, pull the sales by hour and look at when the room actually filled. If you didn't, ask your regulars directly and watch how busy the night before the holiday gets. Then weigh the factors below.
| Factor | Leans toward opening | Leans toward closing or short hours |
|---|---|---|
| Your location | Near hotels, transit, apartments or a neighborhood full of transplants | A suburban strip where most guests are at family dinners |
| Your regulars | A sports crowd that already asks about holiday hours | A dinner crowd that comes for the food, not the game |
| Staffing | Enough people volunteer without pressure | You would have to mandate shifts and risk resentment |
| Kitchen | A short menu you can run with one cook | A full menu that falls apart without your usual line |
| Last year | Steady covers through the afternoon | A slow trickle that barely covered labor |
You don't have to choose between a full day and closed. Most bars that do this well pick a window:
- Game window only. Open shortly before the first kickoff and close after the last game, with no lunch or late-night push.
- Late window only. Skip the early games and open for the evening game, when people have finished dinner and want to get out of the house.
- Close Thanksgiving, push the weekend. Rest the team on the holiday and promote the long weekend's games instead.
- Open New Year's Day, close Thanksgiving (or the reverse), depending on which crowd you actually draw.
The two holidays behave differently. Thanksgiving traffic tends to ebb and flow around family meal times, so expect lulls and rushes rather than a steady room. New Year's Day follows a very late night, which means your closing crew from New Year's Eve is the same pool you need in the morning, and college bowl crowds tend to follow specific teams and alumni groups. If a local school is playing, that alone can justify the day. For more on weighing unusual hours, see our take on keeping a bar open late for games.
Building a holiday skeleton crew schedule
Ask for volunteers early, well before you post the schedule. People plan holidays weeks out, and a shift someone chose is worked very differently from one they were assigned. Offer whatever incentive your policies allow, and confirm how holiday pay works for your team with your payroll provider.
Picture a neighborhood bar with a dozen screens running Thanksgiving on a bartender, one server, a cook and a manager. That can work, but only if each person has a defined job:
- Manager as screen lead. One person owns every TV for the day: the channel map, the sound, the remotes and the call to support if something fails. When everyone owns the TVs, nobody does.
- Bartender covers the rail and the bar screens. They should know how to change an input and reset a receiver without leaving the well for long.
- Server covers the floor and knows the schedule well enough to answer which TV has which game.
- Cook runs a short menu. Wings, a couple of sandwiches, something shareable and maybe a holiday plate. Cut anything that needs a second set of hands.
Stagger arrivals so you are heaviest at kickoffs and halftimes and lighter during the slow stretch of a game. On New Year's Day, avoid scheduling anyone who closed the night before into the opening shift if you can help it. Tired people miss small problems, and small problems are what take screens down.
Before the holiday, run a short refresher on the basics your crew will need with no manager standing over them. Our piece on training staff on bar TVs covers the habits that prevent most game-day downtime.
Assign every screen before the holiday
On a regular Sunday a full staff can improvise. On a holiday you can't. Make every screen decision before the day so the crew only has to follow the plan.
- Build a channel map. One sheet, a row for every screen, a column for each time block. Our bar TV channel map template gives you the layout.
- Decide which game gets the sound and write it down. A posted priority order ends arguments before they start; see which game gets the sound for a fair approach.
- Post a schedule board so guests can find their game without asking a server who is already running two sections. Number your screens and use a simple game schedule board.
- Lock some screens, open others. Decide which TVs stay fixed and which can take requests, so the one server on the floor isn't renegotiating the room all afternoon.
- Think about the dining room. Holiday guests may include families with kids and grandparents who came for a meal, not a game. Keep the dining area quieter, captions on, with the main game visible but not blaring.
- Plan for rivals. Holiday matchups often bring rival fan bases into the same room. A seating plan with a neutral buffer helps; see our notes on rival fans at the bar.
If you have a patio, decide now whether it's part of the plan. Late November and early January can be hard on outdoor screens, and our guide to winterizing patio TVs can help you decide whether to use, cover or remove them.
Run the TV checks days ahead, not at kickoff
The goal is simple: find problems on an ordinary weekday, when you have time and your provider's regular team is working, not on the holiday morning with a skeleton crew.
A few days before:
- Turn on every screen and receiver and tune each one to every channel on your channel map, especially any channel you rarely use. A game on a channel you never watch is the classic holiday surprise.
- Confirm that the channels carrying the games you plan to show are part of your current commercial programming. Lineups change, so check rather than assume.
- Restart any receiver that seems slow, freezes or shows an on-screen message. Note any error codes and look them up in our error code help before calling.
- Check that each receiver that relies on an internet connection is actually connected.
- Put fresh batteries in every remote and label each remote with its screen number.
The day before:
- Print the channel map and the sound plan and tape them behind the bar.
- Post the support contact where the screen lead can find it.
- Decide your fallback: if a main screen fails mid-game, which screen takes that game?
The morning of:
- Turn everything on well before the first kickoff and tune every screen to its first assignment.
- Walk the room and check each screen from the seats, not from behind the bar.
Common holiday game-day mistakes
- Deciding too late. Waiting until the week of leaves you with whoever didn't make other plans, and no time to promote your hours.
- Running the full menu with half a kitchen. Slow tickets on a busy afternoon do more damage than a short menu ever will.
- Nobody owns the TVs. Without a named screen lead, a frozen receiver becomes everyone's problem and nobody's job.
- Assuming it's a normal Sunday lineup. Holiday games can land on channels your bar doesn't usually watch.
- Testing on the morning of. If you find a problem then, you're fixing it with the doors open.
- Forgetting the non-fans. A dining room full of families doesn't want stadium volume.
- Burning out the New Year's Eve crew. The people who closed at the end of a late night shouldn't also be your opening shift.
What to ask your TV provider before the holidays
A short call in the weeks before Thanksgiving can prevent most holiday headaches. Ask:
- Does our current commercial programming include the channels carrying the holiday games we plan to show, and what would it take to add anything we're missing?
- How do we reach support on the holiday itself, and what should our staff have ready when they call?
- Can someone look at a screen or receiver that has been acting up before the holiday week, rather than during it?
- If we want to add screens or open a room for the season, how much lead time do you need?
- For multi-location operators: how are holiday checks coordinated across all of our locations?
Sports Direct | DLM Media is an authorized commercial dealer with technicians and engineers in all 50 states. Our commercial TV support service is built for this kind of planning, and if you're reviewing your programming before the season, you can talk with a programming specialist about what fits your room.