As proposed, the potential for Thursday night flexing covers Week 14 through Week 17. To get the proposal to pass, the proponents could agree to restrict its application to once per season.
Peter King notes in his new Football Morning in America column that, in talking to those who want the flex option to pass, one said, “It might make sense to max it out at one per season.”
It makes more sense, frankly, to not do it at all. And it makes sense for those who want it to pass to agree to restrict it to once per year, for now. Then, once the bridge is crossed, its potential application can expand.
The effort, whether limited to once per year or not, is facing some internal resistance.
“Really hate it,” a coach told King at the league meetings on Sunday.
Someone really loves it, or it wouldn’t be on the agenda. Someone really wants it, or it wouldn’t have rocketed in fewer than two months from something the Commissioner raised downplayed during his pre-Super Bowl press conference as something on the league’s “horizon” to front and center for a vote as soon as today.
Amazon undoubtedly wants it. The league undoubtedly wants to boost Amazon, not for Amazon’s sake but for the benefit of the next round of broadcast negotiations, when the streamers will be firmly at the table to pay a wildly excessive premium for the privilege of televising NFL games.
Given the current technologies, the league could sell its product directly to consumers, without a network or a tech company in the middle. The NFL doesn’t do it, in part because it believes it would make less money that way. The company in the middle adds to the bottom line by coughing up more than it should, so that the relationship can then be used to get consumers to consume other content.
That used to be Murder . . . She Wrote. Now, it’s 2 Chainz. Eventually, it could be whatever the latest Netflix show or movie is, or whatever YouTube wants people with ever-increasing options to sample.
Regardless, expanding the flexing option for Thursday Night Football makes that package more valuable. Which seems to be a message that the league is willing to do whatever is needed to make streaming packages as valuable as possible, in order to preserve and expand the most golden of the goose eggs -- the fees paid by the companies that make the games available to viewers.
