After eight of the 15 “Thursday Night Football” games in 2022 were decided by 10 or more points, the NFL owners are pondering ways to make the league’s 2023 slate more entertaining.
And according to a report from the Sports Business Journal (SBJ), that solution may come in the form of flex scheduling, which the owners are set to vote on during next week’s league meeting. 24 of the 32 owners need to vote in favor of the proposal to pass.
The league already uses flex scheduling for “Sunday Night Football” on NBC, moving more competitive contests from early in the day to primetime, and it will also implement it for the first time for “Monday Night Football” on ESPN in 2023, starting in Week 12.
Per the SBJ, owners will vote whether to move games from Sunday afternoon to Thursday night with 15 days’ notice for Weeks 14-17 and to allow teams to play two games on short rest instead of one.
TNF has long been criticized for featuring uninspiring matchups between teams with below .500 records. According to the SBJ, TNF averaged 9.6 million viewers during the 2022 season—the first on Amazon Prime—but viewership was down nearly 46 percent from the 2021 season, which aired on Fox and the NFL Network.
While the league’s owners may be on board with the proposal, some opposition may be expected from its head coaches. Recovery time, player safety and injury concerns certainly come into play with the intricacies of flex scheduling, which could all potentially be hindered by the suddenness of a changing schedule.
