Weather may have forced the Steelers and Chiefs into a Sunday night kickoff for their Divisional Round playoff game this past weekend. Moving forward though, the Sunday night primetime game appears to be a permanent fixture on the NFL playoff calendar.

Traditionally the NFL has played one Divisional Round playoff game on Saturday afternoon and Saturday evening followed by two games on Sunday afternoon. Apparently the success of Sunday night’s game on the ratings front (37.1 million viewers) becoming the most-watched primetime game in the first two rounds of the playoffs has helped with the decision as well.

Here’s the report via Mike Florio at Pro Football Talk, which builds on what Adam Schefter has also said at ESPN:

Ever since the NFL first started staging Saturday night wild-card and divisional-round playoff games, the possibility of shifting the Sunday schedule from 1:05 p.m. ET and 4:40 p.m. ET to 4:40 p.m. ET and 8:20 p.m. ET had been lingering. And then, with a shift of a single early Sunday game to prime-time necessitated by weather issues in Kansas City, the league apparently will be declaring “eureka!” and making the move permanent. The league had resisted this in the past because it creates a competitive disadvantage where, as in the case of the Steelers, they traveled home late Sunday night and will travel again before Sunday’s game. Meanwhile, the Patriots played at home on Saturday, don’t have to travel at all, and get extra time to prepare, rest, etc. (And no matter what the Steelers have said or will say publicly, they were not happy about the shift in the starting time for Sunday’s game.) The next question is whether the league will do the same thing on the Sunday night of the wild-card round. The possibility that a team playing on the first Sunday night of the playoffs would have to play on the following Saturday could be a factor, especially since the home game in the divisional round has 13 or 14 days between games.

It’s a move that makes sense on a number of levels. It doesn’t really add up that the NFL would make Sunday Night Football its premier television timeslot for the entirety of the regular season and then abandon it for the first two rounds of the playoffs. Sunday Night Football is consistently the number one show in primetime and moving the 1 PM ET kickoff to 8 PM ET would ensure more viewers on average. The NFL could make this change for the Wild Card and Divisional Round. And if they wanted to get really creative, they could forego the Saturday afternoon slot and give us three games on Sunday (1 PM, 4 PM, 8 PM) like during the regular season.

Furthermore, it’s surprising that it took a weather delay for the NFL to realize they could make more money and get more viewers in primetime than in the early afternoon. It’s hard to understand where the NFL’s hesitancy would come from given the entire season is played and teams have to adjust to playing on Thursdays, Sundays, and Mondays. If anything, the added day of rest should be an extra bonus and incentive for the higher seeds in the postseason.

The NFL doesn’t often avoid making decisions that could make them extra revenue, so the only question in moving more playoff games to primetime is how it took this long.