This being reported by John Ourand at Sports Business Journal. He writes that as the National Football League schedule is about to be released (most likely within a week), media executives expect the first year of Thursday Night Football to be filled with very good matchups, even surpassing the Monday Night Football slate on ESPN. With CBS taking the first half of the Thursday Night Football schedule, it’s expected that viewers won’t be seeing pedestrian matchups like Buffalo-Cleveland or Jacksonville-Buffalo.
Ourand writes that media executives are predicting that CBS’ TNF schedule will resemble something close to NBC’s Sunday Night Football which is currently the NFL’s premier package. It’s expected that a Seahawks-49ers game will land on NBC this season and perhaps another Patriots-Broncos contest will be on SNF as well. But in order to make Thursday Night Football on CBS a showcase, the NFL plans to give the Tiffany Network plenty of premier matchups to boost the ratings and also make that package a destination with fans.
Will it sit well with ESPN which is paying close to $2 billion annually for Monday Night Football? Certainly not, but with the Alleged Worldwide Leader expected to enter the postseason business when the playoffs expand, ESPN will find a way to be happy. The NFL will also shuffle one or two premier rivalry games to MNF when the schedule comes out.
But as the schedule is released, one thing is for sure. CBS’ half of Thursday Night Football will be a blockbuster. NFL Network’s half of TNF will contain the more blasé games that we’ve become accustomed since 2007.
Ratings for CBS’ portion of Thursday Night Football are expected to be good, but perhaps not on Sunday Night Football levels which averaged 12.8/21 and 21.7 million viewers.
Last season, the 13 game NFL Network Thursday Night Football schedule averaged a 5.0 rating and 8 million viewers, numbers that will increase significantly on CBS. NFL Network will simulcast CBS’ portion of TNF and will air its own portion in the second half of the season.
