In yet another indication of the mighty NFL’s all-too-powerful ability to market its product to the masses, this has been quite the week for the drip-drop release of the regular-season schedule.
First came the international games. Then the first Black Friday offering was announced. That was followed by the reveal of the opening Monday night matchup. OK, here’s the season-opening kickoff game. New Year’s Eve? Christmas? Plan your holiday feasts accordingly. And yeah, a midseason rematch of the NFC title game is coming in a Sunday afternoon window on Fox.
Talk about a tease or two.
All this came out before the faucet was turned on to unveil the “full schedule” in prime time.
In one sense, you’ve got to give it to the league for playing the drama as another opportunity to stay in the minds of its consumers during the offseason – two weeks since the draft, a little more than two months since the combine and three months after the Super Bowl.
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Just know that some of the most significant slots with this schedule are TBD.
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Brace yourself, NFL fans (and players and coaches, too), for the most fluid NFL schedule in history (that, uh, wasn’t thrown for a loop due to the COVID-19 pandemic).
When NFL owners meet in Minnesota on May 22-23, it’s expected that a proposal will be back on the agenda to allow for flexible scheduling for the "Thursday Night Football" games on Amazon in Weeks 14-17. The measure, needing 24 votes to pass, came up just two votes short of being adopted during the league meetings in Phoenix in March, with two teams (Carolina and Denver) abstaining.
Although New York Giants co-owner John Mara vehemently expressed his opposition during and after the meeting, calling the proposal “abusive” to fans who buy tickets, the proposal has the support of Commissioner Roger Goodell and momentum fueled by several powerful owners.
And you know what that means. Money talks. TV (including streaming broadcasts, with Amazon paying the NFL $1 billion per year) moves the needle.
Never mind the players, and especially the ones from the better teams who will be tapped to switch games from Sunday afternoons to prime time. Apologies to the fans who might arrange to travel from out of town. At their last meeting, NFL owners voted to allow late-season"Monday Night Football"games to be flexed for the first time. And they voted to allow teams to be flexed twice into such short weeks for Thursday night windows, which before could happen just once in a season. The next move for the option of the Thursday night flex seems all but imminent.
As one NFL coach told USA TODAY Sports on Thursday, “It’s coming, as sure an 18thgame is coming down the line.”
Don’t look for any pushback from the collective body of NFL players. In the extension of the labor pact with players that was struck in 2020, NFL owners secured the right to unilaterally flex more of the late-season games.
DeMaurice Smith, the executive director of the NFL Players Association, sounded a lot like Mara in expressing concern for the fans. Smith also said that although there isn’t compelling data that suggests a difference with the injury rate for Thursday night games, he’s mindful of the extra dimensions for playing on short weeks and potentially in multiple cases.
“It’s not just the rate of injury that we’re talking about,” Smith told USA TODAY Sports. “It’s things like load (management) and emotional stress and changing someone’s schedule.”
At the conclusion of the meetings in Phoenix, Goodell reiterated his oft-cited position about the Thursday injury rates being relatively unchanged from Sunday games and pushed back on Mara’s contention that fans are getting a bum deal. And Goodell pointed out that since the NFL began flexing late-season Sunday night games in 2006, the league has averaged roughly 1 ½ flexed games per year – the inference being that a massive overhaul of the late-season Thursday window isn’t the idea.
“So, it’s a very important thing for us to balance with that I would call season-ticket holders and the in-stadium markets,” Goodell said, “but we have millions of fans who also watch on television, so reaching them is a balance that you always strike and making sure we do it right.”
The NFL averaged 9.58 million viewers for the first year of its streaming deal with Amazon in 2022, according to Nielsen Media Research, which was down 46% from the previous season’s games on Fox, the NFL Network and Amazon. The figures supplied by Amazon, citing “average minute audience,” were better, at 11.3 million for the 15 games last season. Either way, a drop-off seemed inevitable last year, given the new platform for the marquee game. But the NFL, with an Amazon deal that extends through 2033, is also motivated to help bolster the viewership by providing appealing matchups later in the season. And the league was encouraged that the Thursday games on Amazon provided the youngest median age (47) of any broadcast window since 2013, according to NFL data. The flex games this season would be determined with no less than 15 days’ notice.
Mara’s words typically carry much weight among NFL owners. Yet in addition to the concern that he expressed for fans – “To flex a game back to Thursday night, for me, is just abusive, and I am adamantly opposed to it,” he said in March – Mara apparently also wasn’t thrilled that the proposal landed on the agenda without being thoroughly vetted with the competition committee of which he is a member.
In the weeks between meetings, presumably there is time to vet the competition committee, if not to get an endorsem*nt. Then again, it’s probably a significant sign that the competition committee apparently wasn’t involved in crafting the proposal to flex on Thursday nights.
In other words, it will take a miracle to sway the room in the opposite direction.
In the meantime, the schedule is set…except the parts that are TBD.
Follow USA TODAY Sports' Jarrett Bell on Twitter @JarrettBell.
