Last week, NFL owners approved flex scheduling for Amazon Prime Video’s Thursday Night Football. The move gives the broadcast property the ability to flex up to two games between Weeks 13 and 17. NBC’s Sunday Night Football and ESPN’s Monday Night Football have the same privilege.
Throughout last season, many fans and media pundits recognized play-by-play announcer Al Michaels’ displeasure with aspects of the schedule. In fact, many of them applauded the league for its decision on social media in order to ensure Michaels receives better games to call. Michaels has gone on the record previously stating that he knows all the games will not be as thrilling as expected and that it is difficult to play on a Sunday-Thursday schedule more than once.
“Flex [scheduling] is fine,” Michaels told Barrett Sports Media, “but I’m hoping that the games as scheduled are good enough that we won’t have to flex.”
Now, teams will be able to play on Thursday nights up to two times per season, making some teams immediately ineligible for flex scheduling, but still potentially inconveniencing fans. John Mara of the New York Giants and Art Rooney of the Pittsburgh Steelers previously criticized an iteration of the proposal and were among the cohort of owners to continue to vote against it.
The league’s executive vice president and chief operating officer of NFL Media, Hans Schroeder, said in a statement to Yahoo Sports that fans were used to the changing schedules on the other broadcast properties.
“We have Week 18 games, where all games are listed as ‘TBDs’ and could go any time on Saturday afternoon or Sunday,” Schroeder said. “And we have wild-card, divisional and playoff games that could get scheduled on short notice, so I don’t want fans to think we aren’t going to be sensitive to that and won’t do our best to communicate thoroughly and as early as we can.”
Amazon Prime Video and the NFL entered into a 11-year media rights agreement in March 2021 worth approximately $1 billion per year to the rights for Thursday night games. The OTT streaming service and other local channels accumulated an average of 9.58 million viewers over its 15-game package. The metric was down 41% from the previous year’s figure of 16.2 million it amassed over FOX, Amazon, NFL Network and other local channels, but attracted the lowest median viewer age (47) since 2013.
Derek Futterman is a contributing editor and sports media reporter for Barrett Media. Additionally, he has worked in a broad array of roles in multimedia production – including on live game broadcasts and audiovisual platforms – and in digital content development and management. He previously interned for Paramount within Showtime Networks, wrote for the Long Island Herald and served as lead sports producer at NY2C. To get in touch, find him on X @derekfutterman.
