THE MMQB's Peter King writes it is OK to agree with Bills G Richie Incognito's assessment that "Thursday night football stinks," but trying to eliminate Thursday games as part of the next CBA would "cut some revenue from the salary cap." Amazon reportedly is paying $50M "just to be able to stream the games on Amazon Prime" in addition to the rights fee NBC and CBS are paying. King: "I'm fine with Thursday night games going away. But let's not have any bleating over the cap cuts (if there are any) due to the package being killed, if indeed it is in the next CBA" (SI.com, 11/6).
SUFFERING FROM OVEREXPOSURE: In Milwaukee, Tom Saler wrote "many explanations" have been offered for the NFL's drop in ratings, but "rarely mentioned ... is the reluctance of NFL power brokers to leave a single dime of media money on the table." It is a "short-sighted money grab that has overexposed the product and further contributed to the epidemic of serious injuries that impairs players' lives and turned an already brutal game into a war of attrition." The NFL's business model is a "textbook example of short-termism gone amok" (MILWAUKEE JOURNAL SENTINEL, 11/5).
TO THE LEFT, TO THE LEFT: In a special to the WALL STREET JOURNAL, FS1's Jason Whitlock writes under the header, "Is Roger Goodell Deliberately Pushing The NFL Leftward?" The NFL is "headed exactly" where Goodell has "steered it -- to the left." The NFL has "long been a combatant in America’s larger culture war." However, Goodell -- whose father, Charles, was a liberal antiwar Republican U.S. senator in the late '60s -- was "always an odd choice to run it." Meanwhile, NFL Exec VP/Communications Joe Lockhart is a former "Democratic political strategist" who is an "aggressive media manipulator." Goodell and Lockhart are "damaging the league’s longstanding and highly profitable brand," and the question is "how long the owners will continue to allow the pair to reshape the NFL" (WALL STREET JOURNAL, 11/6).
