Even the end of the regular season cannot prevent members of the NFL community from continuing to roast awful “Thursday Night Football” games featured on Amazon Prime Video.
“I just would like to see more emphasis on improving the product on the field,” ESPN “Monday Night Football” commentator Troy Aikman said on the latest edition of the “SI Media Podcast,” per Jimmy Traina of Sports Illustrated. “I’d like to see that there’s some interest in that as well. It seems like all these decisions are made to increase revenue, which is great, but then it’s less time on the field for players, and then it’s less time here, and the product begins to erode a little bit, and I think we’ve got to be really, really careful about that and I’ve been saying that for a while.”
Aikman was discussing the business of pro football and how the NFL is “really good at making a lot of money,” particularly as it pertains to dominating any list of the country’s most watched sporting events. Nevertheless, the Hall of Fame quarterback heavily suggested he’d remove all “Thursday Night Football” games from the schedule.
“There were games that we watched, and I won’t say what network most of them were on, and I had to ask myself, ‘Is this professional football?’ There was some bad, bad football being played, and that’s not good,” Aikman added during the conversation.
Legendary play-by-play broadcaster Al Michaels called plenty of poor “Thursday Night Football” action for Amazon this season and recently compared doing so to selling “a used car.” As Traina pointed out, Tampa Bay Buccaneers quarterback Tom Brady remarked in October that “there’s a lot of bad football from what I watch.”
“I watch a lot of bad football,” Brady continued at that time. “Poor quality of football. That’s what I see.”
It was reported back in May 2021 that Amazon’s 11-year agreement with the NFL is worth an average of $1.2 billion per year. In short, “Thursday Night Football” isn’t going anywhere anytime soon.
