Almost no one — not coaches, players, most fans and pundits — cares much for the NFL’s “Thursday Night Football” games and now there’s a report that the league will be taking a hard look at the package that brings in hundreds of millions of dollars even as it turns off viewers.
The NFL may even do away with or limit the games when the current contract with CBS and NBC expires after the 2017 season (barring a renegotiation), Pro Football Talk’s Mike Florio reports. The games have been an expanding fixture since the 2006 season, but this season has brought the dawning realization, perhaps even among NFL owners who have a voracious appetite for more revenue, that there actually can be too much football.
No less a respected NFL observer than John Madden admitted that Thursday games need to be tweaked. The problem, as the Hall of Famer sees it, is that there aren’t enough good, competitive teams for all the TV slots that exist — “an early Sunday window, a late Sunday window, a Sunday night window, a Monday night window, a Thursday night window” — on the NFL calendar. That Thursday night game in particular is a problem for him.
“Something has to be done about ‘Thursday Night Football,’” the 80-year-old former Raiders coach said in a podcast with the Bay Area News Group. “It just doesn’t work. It’s not only a fan thing, it’s a team thing. It’s a safety thing. It’s a competitive thing. It doesn’t work. I know about money, and I know about business. Maybe you have to tweak stuff a little more. To help teams, maybe you get a bye the week before.”
According to Florio:
“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.”
Madden thought it was particularly unfair that the Washington Redskins had to play a Sunday night game, then travel to Dallas for a Thanksgiving game while the Cowboys could play at 1 p.m. the previous Sunday at home.
“That’s wrong. That’s an oops,” Madden said. “You play a team on Sunday night and make them travel and play on Thursday. I remember in my coaching days, as players get older, it takes them longer to heal up from a Sunday game, and guys weren’t ready to play until Thursday or Friday.”
A little over two years ago, Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban warned that putting the NFL on so many nights would make it less special, decreasing its status as destination viewing.
“I think the NFL is 10 years away from an implosion,” the Dallas Mavericks owner told reporters in March 2014. “I’m just telling you, pigs get fat, hogs get slaughtered. And they’re getting hoggy. Just watch. Pigs get fat, hogs get slaughtered. When you try to take it too far, people turn the other way.
“I’m just telling you, when you’ve got a good thing and you get greedy, it always, always, always, always, always turns on you. That’s rule number one of business.”
The NFL has added regular-season Saturday night games, too, although this season is an anomaly with Christmas Eve falling on a Saturday and bringing with it 12 games. Cuban’s concern was partly selfish, with the NFL and NBA seasons overlapping, and, yes, there was a bit of irony in an NBA owner worrying about the dangers of being a constant presence, given that there are 2,400 regular-season NBA games compared with the NFL’s 512.
Still, plenty of people wondered if he might not have had a point when TV ratings for Thursday night dipped early in the season. With the election over and games becoming more meaningful, they’re improved, but not to the point at which even a TV package that brought a reported $450 million can be considered safe.
“You always want to get up to that line and never cross it,” Commissioner Roger Goodell said of saturation earlier this month. “For us, that’s exactly how we’ve done it. That’s why we’ve moved really slowly with ‘Thursday Night Football,’ as an example. We started with six games, then went to eight and 13 and 16. And we don’t know what the right combination is so that’s why we’re only doing short-term deals.
“What we try to do is find the right balance there. The great thing about football is that it’s a very short season. It’s only 17 weeks and then playoffs, and every game counts. That makes our inventory incredibly valuable, but you also have to be careful about taking it and broadening it out, and saturating the market with it. That’s something we’re very conscious of.”
NFL officials can’t say Cuban didn’t warn them, even though his comments in 2014 were met with skepticism.
“They’re trying to take over every night of TV,” Cuban said. “Initially, it’ll be, ‘Yeah, they’re the biggest-rating thing that there is.’ OK, Thursday, that’s great, regardless of whether it impacts [the NBA] during that period when we cross over. Then if it gets Saturday, now you’re impacting colleges. Now it’s on four days a week.
“It’s all football. At some point, the people get sick of it.”
Even the people who run football may come to that conclusion.