NFL games scheduled for Thursday nights toward the end of the regular season are now eligible to be flexed along with the Sunday and Monday night games during those weeks. Tuesday on 92.9 The Game in Atlanta, host Steak Shapiro and former Atlanta Falcons offensive lineman Mike Johnson talked about flexing Thursday night games for weeks 13-17.
Even though the league will have to give teams 21 days notice before a game is flexed, Johnson said players don’t like it because regardless of how much advance notice you get, you still have a quick turnaround time between games if you end up playing the Sunday before. He felt like the things NFL players put their bodies through over the course of a game doesn’t necessarily justify making more money.
“There’s a law of diminishing returns,” he told Shapiro. “And in the end yeah you look at the numbers and say ‘Oh that’s great I can’t wait to make a little bit more money.’ But when you wake up on Monday morning, and you know that you’ve got to turn around in three days and play one, I don’t know that financially the incentive is there for that much. You don’t think of that in the moment.”
Steak went on to say that the players ultimately come secondary in all this, as the whole idea is to just simply appease the league’s TV audience and the networks. Especially after Amazon made it pretty clear that they weren’t thrilled with the schedule of games they got for their maiden season as the new home to Thursday Night Football.
“It’s the fans watching on television, and getting Amazon and CBS and FOX,” he said. “They want great games on Thursday nights as well and that’s really what matters more than a guy that’s scheduled a flight to go see the Steelers in Pittsburgh and now the Steelers are playing three days earlier.”
Host Mark Zinno chimed in saying that the league proved during the COVID pandemic that it could survive without stadiums full of fans. The league and the owners know that the TV revenue is the cash cow, and so they have to prioritize the viewers in a way more so than people buying tickets and showing up to games.
“There’s no reason to cater to the fans in the stands,” he said.
