The NFL has come under fire over the last few years due to Thursday Night Football, with players accusing the league of hypocrisy regarding how it claims to care about safety while simultaneously making them play football on shortened rest. But despite calls from players for things to change, the NFL is going to keep chugging along with their mid-week showcase.
This year, things will be a little different. Not in ways that have anything to do with the safety and general well-being of players, mind you, but with how you can watch games go down. According to a report by John Ourand of Sports Business Journal, the NFL has turned to Fox as its new home for Thursday Night Football.
Sources: Fox will have 11 Thursday Night NFL games, sharing with NFL Network and a digital partner. Fox will have expanded mobile rights. The TNF digital package (ie, Amazon's) still is up for sale.
— John Ourand (@Ourand_Puck) January 31, 2018
This is a change from where the games have been held recently, as CBS (since 2014) and NBC (since 2016) have housed games alongside NFL Network. Not much is known about how Fox, which shows games every Sunday and is in the NFL’s Super Bowl hosting rotation, will approach this new challenge.
We do, thanks to Ourand, have an idea of who will call Thursday contests. Well, we don’t know exactly who it will be, but we do have an idea of who it won’t be: Fox’s No. 1 NFL broadcast duo of Joe Buck and Troy Aikman.
As of right now, it does not look like Joe Buck and Troy Aikman will do the Thursday night games. Full story coming tomorrow in SBD's Morning Buzz.
— John Ourand (@Ourand_Puck) January 31, 2018
For how unpopular Thursday Night Football seems to be among players and some fans, millions of people tune in to watch every week, so it’s a valuable property regardless and Fox has to be ecstatic over the fact that it has won the chance to broadcast the games.
