Mike Florio is not a fan of Amazon flexing Thursday Night Football NFL games, and you should hate it with every fiber of your being, too!
There are people who hate the idea of the NFL allowing Amazon to flex games for its Thursday Night Football streaming property, and then there’s Pro Football Talk’s Mike Florio…
Although I am not completely to the point of saying TNF needs to die like the NCAA totally needs to, but this thing needs to be revamped in the worst way possible. Florio, who works for an NFL broadcasting rights competitor in NBC, went to town on the league and Amazon over the simply ludicrous practice of flexing games for TNF. Streaming is the future, but now is the present, dawg.
Spending all of one’s money with Amazon is a lifestyle, but not necessarily one that I agree with.
Roger Goodell should be ashamed for pandering to Amazon like this because what are ethics?!
NFL should be ashamed over its most egregious Amazonian pandering practices
Look. I understand what the NFL is trying to do here. They have a new major broadcasting partner in Amazon, and they want to do right by them, unlike with ESPN. The seminal reason why Sunday Night Football is the best NFL TV product is this: They are in prime position to get the best games, pretty much whenever they want each week. It is because flexing is readily available on Sundays.
In the third or sometimes fourth viewing window of the day, depending on if the Jags are London’s Finest that week, we get to see the best players on the biggest brands engage in combat on the gridiron for our entertainment. It’s a lot of Patrick Mahomes and Aaron Rodgers and Dallas Cowboys, for better or worse. This is not a stage built for the Atlanta Falcons or Kirk Cousins of the world, y’all.
Simply put, we never see absolute dreck on Sunday Night Football, and for good reasons. Since Thursday Night Football and Monday Night Football are standalone properties, you get what you get, for better or worse or downright ugly. This is why they end up with Russell Wilson Mile High disasters and Marcus Mariota trying to throw the football in the rain while lying from his back…
In truth, flexing games to different days is a great way to have the NFLPA up in arms. Surprise! You guys are playing on four days rest! Again! Yeah, good luck telling Mahomes and the rest of the Kansas City Chiefs that they’re playing the New York Jets four days after blowing out Justin Herbert and the Los Angeles Chargers over at Arrowhead.
Not only will the NFLPA lose its collective mind, but what about the fans who are trying to go to these games? People plan their entire social lives around these events. Just imagine your favorite team is playing the Las Vegas Raiders in Sin City on a Sunday afternoon, only to find out that your game is getting flexed to Thursday. Good luck getting extra days off from work or rebooking your flights and hotels!
At some point, we just need to Deacon Jones head slap some sense into these idiots, man. What are we doing?! What are we doing?! We are Taylor Twellman-ing ourselves to the brink of insanity trying to make sense out of this utter nonsense. This is the NFL, not the NBA, the NHL, MLB or MLS. You have to be better than this. As soon as you turn your the fans, they will so turn on you.
So how do we make TNF a product worth purchasing Prime Video for? We could just have the Dallas Cowboys play all their games on Thursday Night and really make America’s Team the Notre Dame of the NFL. People hate them, so maybe more people will tune into watch the glorified hype machine do what it does by never reaching its conference title bout since Bill Clinton was in office.
Another option (h/t Dot Com Bossman) is to make Thursday Night Football be a regulation gauntlet of sorts. The 32 NFL teams vote who gets to play another craptastic club on Thursday for our enjoyment. Think Survivor basically, as well as the cross-promotional stuff these TV partners can do with it. You win in the gauntlet, you are exempt from going back in for the rest of the season.
Al Michaels would spite quit over this, hating this more than vegetables, if we are being honest.
Should you continue to be terrible, oh, you will stay. On the last week of the season, the two god-awful football monstrosities will battle for the No. 1 pick. The winner gets it, while the loser is forced to go on HBO’s Hard Knocks during the offseason. Goodell will get to make their first-round pick for them and then they get to be the Week 1 host of the S**tbird Gauntlet on TNF next year!
These are all good to bad to terrible ideas, but they are far superior to TNF flexing, to be honest.
The only thing worse is Super Bowl Saturday. Just play the big game on Presidents’ Day Weekend.
Go to Source
Author: John Buhler
March 25, 2023 | 4:43 pm
