NFL Flexing Its (Thursday Night) Muscle

Not surprisingly, the NFL was able to get enough owners to agree to what the league office wanted and will have flex scheduling on Thursday nights this season.  It's experimental for this season only, but the option rolls over into next year should they not flex any games this season.  But, who are we kidding?  Of course they're going to!  Kinda like how we already know they're gonna make it permanent moving forward.

Giants owner John Mara was very anti-Thursday night flexing when it was first brought up in March, and he remains vehemently anti-Thursday night flexing.  He was one of the eight owners to vote against it (it should be noted that it passed 24-8, just meeting the 75 percent threshold).  And he's right.  Thursday night flexing is a terrible idea!

Raiders owner Mark Davis was even more blunt in his assessment.  He's not a fan of any flex scheduling.  Not on Sunday night.  Not on Monday.  Not on Thursday.  His stance is, "make a schedule and stick with it."  (That, obviously, is a bit unrealistic, but his main point is a reasonable one.)

Mara's main concern is about the fans buying tickets to the game.  There's a big difference between Sunday afternoon and Thursday night.  For one thing, travel plans need to change.  For another, one's a school night.  And it's not exactly as if people can drop everything last minute to go to the game!  Even though they changed the proposal from 15-days' notice to 28 days, that wasn't enough to convince Mara.  He still sees more negatives than positives.

The counterargument (the one that 24 owners agreed with) is that the NFL also has a responsibility to the fans watching the game on TV.  It's funny how they care about that now when the Thursday night schedule last season was so bad that Al Michaels was openly critical of the quality of the games.  This is also the same league that took the Thursday night package and moved it from TV to streaming-only last season.  And the same league that took Peacock's $10 million for exclusive rights to a playoff game!

So, sorry, but I'm not buying that argument!  There's one reason and one reason only why they wanted Thursday night flexing.  It's the same reason they moved Thursday Night Football to Amazon and the same reason they improved the Thursday night schedule this season.  Money.  The league thinks it can make more money by flexing games from Sunday afternoon to Thursday night.  If they didn't, they wouldn't have pushed for it.

And that's exactly how the league is spinning it.  We already knew there would be Monday night flexing starting this season.  That was worked into the new TV contract.  Now, they have Thursday night flexing, too, so they have the ability to move a game into any of the three primetime windows.  Which they obviously see as a huge win, especially late in the season.

In addition to the four weeks' notice, they've put in some other provisions about Thursday night flexing that presumably alleviated some of the owners' fears.  Only the five post-Thanksgiving Thursday nights are eligible to be flexed (Although, who we kidding?  It's really only four, since there's no way they're flexing the Cowboys out on the Thursday after Thanksgiving).  They can flex a maximum of two games during those five weeks, and teams can only be flexed in once.  Teams are also still limited to a maximum of two Thursday nights and seven total primetime games on the season.

They can sugarcoat it all they want.  They can spout off all of these stats to make it sound like this is a good thing that benefits everybody.  But, who's it actually benefitting?  It's not benefitting the ticket-buying fans.  It's not benefitting the players.  It's benefitting one party and one party alone.  Amazon.  Amazon is paying a lot for the rights to Thursday Night Football, and the NFL is trying to keep its newest broadcast partner happy.  That's all this is.  And it's VERY transparent (no pun intended).

I'm shocked the players union went along with this.  Although, that assumes the union was actually given input.  The more likely scenario is that the league just did it and told the players to suck it up.  Because for all the preaching they do about player safety, this proves that they're all talk.  They don't actually care.  Not if it comes at the expense of pissing off a broadcast partner.

Players weren't enamored with the idea of playing multiple Thursday night games to begin with.  And I'd imagine their reaction to finding out they have a Thursday night game on short rest will be even less enthusiastic.  They don't like Thursday night games at all, but acknowledge the fact that they're good for the league, so they're willing to put up with the short week once a season.  Now they might have to do it twice.  With one of those potentially on short notice.

For a league that claims to preach player safety, they obviously aren't too worried about those concerns.  If they cared, they wouldn't have pushed so hard for this.  Instead, they're giving Amazon what it wants.  The players be damned!  Ditto about the ticket-buying fans!  But as long as Amazon is happy, that's all that matters!

It also isn't lost on me how this unfairly impacts some teams and indirectly benefits others.  For argument's sake, say they decide to flex out the Saints-Rams game in Week 16.  Now, instead of playing on Thursday night, those two are playing on Christmas Eve.  Some Christmas present!  Meanwhile, the popular teams who you'd figure are more likely to get flexed, may end up having to play on a short week twice while some teams don't have any short weeks.  (Excluding Thanksgiving and the season opener, there's room for 15 Thursday night games on the schedule.  Throw in Black Friday and that's 16 games....or, one per team, which is the fairest way to do it.)

Thursday night flexing is nothing more than the NFL's latest money grab.  As well as its latest middle finger to the fans.  They may claim it's what fans want, but they don't actually care.  All they care about is making sure Amazon's check clears.  This is further proof of that.