From the article:

With mounting criticism of the quality of every-week Thursday football, scattered suggestions have emerged in recent weeks that the NFL could pull the plug on the experiment. Those suggestions are stronger than that; per a source with knowledge of the situation, the league will be considering the possibility of ending, or at least limiting, Thursday Night Football.

The current contract with CBS and NBC runs through 2017, which means that changes to the package could be made by 2018 — barring a renegotiation.

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.

One of the possible options mentioned in the report: Starting the yearly Thursday Night Football slate on Thanksgiving each season. That—if the right games and teams are chosen—could make a big difference.

http://www.nj.com/sports/nfl/2016/11/is_...ing_t.html

(11-27-2016 04:39 PM)Maize Wrote:  From the article:

With mounting criticism of the quality of every-week Thursday football, scattered suggestions have emerged in recent weeks that the NFL could pull the plug on the experiment. Those suggestions are stronger than that; per a source with knowledge of the situation, the league will be considering the possibility of ending, or at least limiting, Thursday Night Football.

The current contract with CBS and NBC runs through 2017, which means that changes to the package could be made by 2018 — barring a renegotiation.

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.

One of the possible options mentioned in the report: Starting the yearly Thursday Night Football slate on Thanksgiving each season. That—if the right games and teams are chosen—could make a big difference.

http://www.nj.com/sports/nfl/2016/11/is_...ing_t.html

If they do either of the options talked about above (elimination or beginning Thanksgiving Thursday night), college football on Thursday night during the months of October and most of November will return to its former status. So I am all for it.

Cheers,
Neil

Just give the Thanksgiving teams a bye the week before and kill off Thursday Night Football entirely.


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I don't mind NFL Thursday Night football from Thanksgiving onward. College is essentially done at that point anyway.

It would be nice to have 2 Saturday games for a couple weeks in December too. I know the NFL currently does this somewhat --- but those games are buried on the NFL Network. Give them back to FOX and CBS to show at 1 and 4:30 like it used to be.

Get rid of Thursday night NFL FB

What they should do is move the Thursday night game to ESPN and give Monday Night Football back to one of the networks.

We can only hope its eliminated.

NFL=no fun league.
NCAA football over NFL anyday

(11-27-2016 06:42 PM)HP-TBDPITL Wrote:  What they should do is move the Thursday night game to ESPN and give Monday Night Football back to one of the networks.

ESPN's rate structure with cable carriers has a provision for an automatic reduction if ESPN loses live NFL content. Quite frankly, it would probably be a blow from which ESPN would never recover, as I believe it would be around $1.50 per subscriber per month.

You'd probably be more likely to see all of the Big Four move their NFL packages to cable in the same year. ESPN would probably wind up with the AFC package, the NFC package would be on FS1, Sunday Night Football on NBCSN, and Monday Night Football on CBSSN (unless if CBS acquires Turner, in which case they keep the AFC package and MNF stays put). Obviously there has to be someway to make up the inventory created by the regional nature of the existing telecasts, so each of the Big Four uses networks like FX, TNT, ESPN2, etc.


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ESPN wouldn't be losing live content in that case, it'd just be moved. And I have to agree that TNF would be better on ESPN and MNF on over-the-air.

How about this, to keep the same number of regular-season games (16) on ESPN that they currently have.

1) Thursday night games from week 6 through week 14, not including Thanksgiving, on ESPN, and only teams coming off of a bye week play on Thursday -- that's 8 games.

2) Monday night games move to ABC except that in 8 weeks of the season there will be doubleheaders on Monday, with an east coast game at 7:00 ET on ABC and a west coast game at 10:15 ET on ESPN.

(11-27-2016 04:39 PM)Maize Wrote:  http://www.nj.com/sports/nfl/2016/11/is_...ing_t.html

I like Thursday night football and don't really see the big deal in the scheduling with the exception being that it appeared that the NFL/NFLN used the Thursday night platform to make sure every team in the NFL gets one national broadcast during the season. I don't think that a team should be on MNF and TNF in the same week though. Or maybe the SNF slot and TNF in the same week shouldn't happen. But if you are a 1 or 4pm game on Sunday I don't want to hear any complaining about playing a TNF game that week. Most of these guys had Saturday games and either a Friday or a Thursday game in the same week. Even in the MAC where you get those Tuesday or Wednesday games sometimes they do try to spread those out so you aren't Tues and Saturday in the same week.

The average NFL player is much bigger than those in the MAC and Sun Belt.