The NFL Should At Least Be Honest About Its Reasons for Allowing Thursday Night Football Flex
League meetings here in Minneapolis are winding down and, as such, we’ve got a lot to get to …
• I’d respect the NFL’s heavy hand on the state of Thursday Night Football if the league would just be honest about it. Call it what is, and tell the people who’s being taken care of.
It was never about the fans. It’s about the higher power the NFL answers to.
That higher power is the broadcast partners who cut the checks that make the league one of the world’s most powerful money-making sports entities. And the reality is that serving those broadcast partners has gotten more complicated. There are more mouths to feed, and what’s being fed came at an otherworldly price that, understandably, has made those at the table far more demanding about what they’ll be eating.
The league has made a lot of money by expanding its TV presence under Roger Goodell’s watch.
Michael Chow/USA TODAY Network
Until the last set of broadcast deals, the NFL could hide half of the TNF schedule in the NFL Network–only windows. (Who was NFLN going to complain to about that? Itself?) But with the decision to sell off the whole package, places to stash AFC South stinkers became more scarce. Add to that what ABC-ESPN paid to keep Monday Night Football, and now the natural order of things in broadcasting games has turned upside down.
So the MNF flex was installed first, and now the TNF flex is in.
You think the NFL cares that you booked a flight for a Sunday game in December that may now be played three days ahead of schedule? You think the league’s first concern is how players’ bodies may respond to playing on multiple short weeks in a single season? You think Park Avenue is worried about a potential logistics nightmare that could leave teams scrambling to find hotels with 190 rooms available during the holidays on short notice?
Of course not. The message here is clear. To the players, it’s: Take the money this will bring you and shut up. To the teams it’s, more or less: Deal with it. And to the fans, it’s: You’re the junkies, we’ve got your fix and you’ll keep coming back no matter how mad you might get.
The league’s right, too. It knows, in the end, there’s nothing the players, team staff or fans can really do about it. The NFL also knows that its ability to keep its partners, and particularly Amazon, happy is the biggest variable here, especially because, long term, Amazon and other streaming services don’t need the NFL to prosper the same way that the networks do, and there’s really power in a willingness to walk away.
But I do know who won’t walk away from the NFL over this, and that’s all of us.
Which is exactly why the league can abuse the fans in any way it wants to.
It’d just be a little easier to swallow if the NFL wouldn’t play everyone for idiots, and just concede who they’re answering to on this one.
• Jets staffers showed trepidation in saying, going back about a month, that Aaron Rodgers would be in attendance for all, or most, of the team’s offseason program—they knew he had previous commitments to honor and didn’t want to come off as pushy from the start.
That said, I know they’re pretty happy with his participation so far, and they have to be overjoyed with the symbolism provided by his attendance at Day 1 of full OTAs on Monday.
I can also see why folks in Green Bay would be incensed at those images—the Packers themselves felt like Rodgers’s absence last spring may have delayed the development of promising young receivers Christian Watson and Romeo Doubs, which ultimately may have cost the team a playoff spot. The thing with that is I don’t think the Packers were ever getting this version of Rodgers again. I think for him to be there at this point of the offseason, it was almost going to have to be with a new team.
A similar situation unfolded with Tom Brady a few years ago. After picking his spots in attending Patriots offseason workouts for years, Brady literally broke COVID-19 protocols to get reps with new Buccaneers teammates in 2020, and then was trusted to run a veteran version of the offseason program on his own the last couple of years for Tampa Bay. Going somewhere new meant a new level of responsibility for Brady, which he embraced.
Rodgers is embracing his in the same way with the Jets now, it seems. Which is good for the Jets and, in the end, as much as it might sting, kind of irrelevant to what could’ve been in Green Bay.
Brady’s next chapter with the NFL involves an ownership stake, but we don’t know what his real level of involvement will be.
Nathan Ray Seebeck/USA TODAY Sports
• Speaking of Brady, his investment into the Raiders is something that Las Vegas owner Mark Davis has been in pursuit of for some time—and Brady’s buy-in with the WNBA’s Aces was, indeed, simply a precursor to the agreement the future Hall of Famer and the Raiders have reached, an agreement for Brady to enter in as a limited partner that’s been submitted to the NFL for approval.
From a practical standpoint, it’ll be interesting to see what it means. I don’t know that Brady would want the kind of front-office job that would require him to criss-cross the country to look at college players every spring, but people who know him well say they could envision him being intrigued with some sort of football czar role.
For now, I’d guess he’ll stay mostly in the background, particularly with two former New England colleagues of his, in Josh McDaniels and Dave Ziegler, running the show in Vegas.
• The NFL’s decision to award Super Bowl LX to San Francisco is significant in that it’s the second time the league’s premier event will land at Levi’s Stadium, and there aren’t that many stadiums that have been repeat hosts. Of the current lot, State Farm Stadium (Arizona), Hard Rock Stadium (Miami), Raymond James Stadium (Tampa Bay), NRG Stadium (Houston) and the Caesars Superdome (New Orleans) are the only ones that have.
Inglewood’s SoFi Stadium is vying to join that group by hosting Super Bowl LXI.
I asked a couple of teams that have hosted Super Bowls, but not more than one, about it at these meetings, and there’s at least some feeling that the financial investment and the lift it takes from local officials to land, and then put on, one may not be worth the while of cities that aren’t tourist destinations. But clearly the Bay Area felt like it was.
• Congrats to Devin McCourty. He’s going to be excellent on NBC.
• It matters that Bryce Young is already getting reps with the first team. Panthers coach Frank Reich’s logic in not making Young the starter from the jump was that he didn’t want to hold back the veterans who’ve been working since early April, or reset the coaches who’ve been working to install the offense. So the fact that he’s getting first-team reps means he’s catching up in a hurry.
• I’ll say that if DeAndre Hopkins really wants to be traded, and every time he talks it sounds like it’s on his mind, he does have control over that. He just has to be willing to take less money to facilitate it. That, in the end, is what it’ll take to draw a team like the Bills or Chiefs in.
• Good for Austin Ekeler, getting an extra $2 million in incentives to report for his seventh year as a pro, and with the Chargers. The reality is running backs, and especially older ones, have so little leverage in these situations that any sort of negotiating win should be regarded as a big win. And this is a worthwhile one for both player and team.
• Ben Roethlisberger’s comments the other day on his successor in Pittsburgh, Kenny Pickett, may have come off as a little selfish—but I see them as very human and real. Players like Roethlisberger are protective of their legacies, and I’d be surprised if there weren’t a lot of the old quarterback’s peers who nodded and understood how he was feeling in saying that.
• Speaking of being real, this, from Seahawks QB Geno Smith, is worth your time.
