Nobody likes Thursday Night Football. The players and teams don’t like it because if the extremely short week and the toll that it takes on everybody involved. The fans don’t like it because the quality of play takes a noticeable dip from games that are played on Sundays because of the short week. And shoot, the networks probably don’t like it either because they have to pay an extra couple hundred million dollars for games that they could have the rights to air on Sundays.
But in Roger Goodell’s quest for world domination and putting the NFL on your televisions seven nights a week, Thursday Night Football has expanded into a full season’s worth of games. A few years ago, it was initially expanded to a half season as a ploy to put exclusive games on NFL Network and boost the league channel’s distribution and carriage fees. Then the league opened the games to the highest bidder and created not one but two television packages and a Twitter deal. Now it’s impossible to remember week to week who’s broadcasting games between CBS, NBC, NFL Network, and Twitter.
The latest
Alas, with ratings taking a tumble this season and the complaints about Thursday Night Football getting louder, the NFL could finally be coming to the realization that less is more.
According to Mike Florio and Pro Football Talk, the NFL is seriously considering reducing the TNF schedule or eliminating the games entirely when the rights agreement ends after the 2017 season.
The league realizes that, with every team playing once on a short week each season, many of the Thursday games necessarily will have reduced appeal. Adding extra prime-time games to the Sunday/Monday inventory also has created a sense that the league has saturated the marketplace with stand-alone evening games.
Options include (but aren’t limited to) getting rid of Thursday games completely and possibly starting the package at Thanksgiving and continuing it through the end of the season, with games likely to generate broad interest selected in April for November/December programming. Thursday Night Football debuted a decade ago as a device for providing game content for NFL Network, allowing the league-owned operation to generate higher fees from cable and satellite providers.
As the source explained it, the money generated from NFL Network due to the annual slate of exclusive games isn’t large enough to make it an impediment to broader efforts to strike the right balance between giving national audiences enough, but not too much, pro football — and to ensure that games played in prime time are truly worthy of being seen.
Has the league saturated the marketplace with bad games between bad teams that not a lot of people have interest in watching? Absolutely. How many seasons do we have to sit through a Thursday night Jags-Titans epic struggle or watch the Browns’ annual primetime appearance? The extra Thursday game has also further diluted the quality of games elsewhere in primetime (especially Monday Night Football) and the games that are shown on Sunday afternoons in traditional timeslots.
Make no mistake about it, the NFL is facing this dilemma because of their own greed and single-minded pursuit of revenue. From the start everyone knew that Thursday Night Football was sacrificing a lot of things – quality of play, player safety and well-being, popularity amongst fans – but the league went all out with it anyways.
It’s hard to imagine the league admitting complete defeat with their dream of owning Thursday nights in the fall so it’s possible we might see them dial back the schedule to a half season once again. That way the league can still have their Thursday night games late in the season or even put some games on NFL Network. Maybe they can even construct a mini-package of 2 or 3 games for networks to bid on so they can eek out a few million dollars.
It’s the right move to make, we’ll see if the NFL actually follows through with it in two years time or if the revenue generated from year-long Thursday Night Football is too tempting to pass up.
UPDATE: In response to Florio’s report, the NFL says they are “fully committed” to Thursday Night Football.
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