McDaniels Sees Challenges With Flexing Thursday Night Football

One of the changes the NFL has considered going forward is flexing its Thursday Night Football games.

Under this change, the NFL could move Sunday afternoon games to Thursday night from Week 14 to Week 17, so long as there is a 15-day notice.

The vote for this proposal was tabled for the time being at the Annual League Meeting last week.

Raiders Coach Josh McDaniels gave his thoughts on the proposal at this year's event.

“Look, I don’t really get into if it’s better financially for the league or anything like that because that’s way above my pay grade," McDaniels said. "But as a coach, there’s some challenges with that because if you’re thinking: OK, we have a big game coming up late in the season against somebody and it’s a Sunday game, or scheduled to be a Sunday game, and you’re thinking you are going to have a full week of practice for it, then all of a sudden it gets flexed to a Thursday game, now all of a sudden you really don’t have much practice at all for it. Could it impact the actual quality of the game or the outcome possibly? I mean, maybe.

"So I think there’s some consequences that we might run into eventually if they choose to do it that could change some of the dynamics for us. Obviously if you flex somebody else to Thursday and then you’re the team they play afterward, now you gave them 10 days to prepare for you late in the season. So there are a lot of different things I’m sure everybody will go through to try to figure out. But look, we’ll play whenever they tell us. They flexed us last year to Saturday, and we played on a Saturday. So whatever it is, it is. We’ll do whatever the league says is our responsibility to play and coach. I just think there could be some inherent challenges with it if they do it.”

The 2023 NFL Draft will go from April 27-29 and be held at Union Station in Kansas City, Mo. The 2023 NFL Year and Free Agency period began at 4 p.m. EDT on March 15.

The Raiders are expected to be significant players in the free-agent market this offseason.

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