One year ago, it seemed that anyone not associated with the NFL hated “Thursday Night Football” — players spoke out against it and fans poked fun at it. Even executives with the networks that carried the programming privately wished it would go away.
“You don’t hear about any of that anymore,” said Mark Silverman, president of Fox Sports National Networks. “One year later, the whole narrative changed. I like to think that we played a major role in making that a much better story for the NFL.”
NFL executives and owners remained committed to taking over Thursday night in the same way the NFL took over Sunday night and Monday night. One year ago, Fox signed a five-year deal worth more than $3 billion to get rights to “Thursday Night Football,” shifting the package from a split of NBC and CBS.
Brian Rolappgetty images
The gambit paid off for both the league and Fox. Fox executives pushed the NFL to put better games on the network, agreeing to sacrifice some matchups that would have anchored the network’s Sunday afternoon lineup, such as highly-rated Eagles-Giants and Saints-Cowboys.
The moves helped Fox increase “Thursday Night Football” ratings 2 percent this season. But those gains may have negatively affected Fox’s strong Sunday afternoon ratings, which saw the lowest increase among all NFL partners — at just 2 percent as well. When looking at Fox’s national window in isolation, that package was down 3 percent. Still, it remained television’s most-watched window for the 10th straight year.
Fox executives said the ratings performances for all the packages matched their expectations — so much so that they plan to make the same request of NFL schedule makers this offseason.
Meanwhile, Brian Rolapp, the NFL’s chief media and business officer, believes Thursday night has grown to one of the strongest programming vehicles for the NFL. “Our reach model
is really working with ‘Thursday Night Football,’” he said.
