Thursday Night Football On Amazon Could Be Set To Change Drastically In The 2023 NFL Season

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Let’s face it.

Thursday Night Football on Amazon absolutely stunk in 2022.

Surprisingly, that had little to do with Amazon itself. It was the first year the retail giant turned streamer had the rights to the games and, all things considered, the production was pretty solid.

But the games themselves? Wooooooh boy, talk about your clunkers.

It seemed like every week fans tuned in to watch new, horrible game between two teams that provided little-to-no entertainment value.

Even broadcaster Al Michaels quickly grew tired of having to call terrible games. And it was evident in his tone, which only stood to make the product that much more unwatchable.

But now that all could be about to change.

Ben Fischer and John Ourand of Sports Business Journal report that the league plans to vote on whether to approve flex scheduling for Thursday Night Football games in 2023.

Flex scheduling could be coming to Amazon’s “Thursday Night Football.”

Owners will be asked at next week’s league meetings to approve a flex scheduling plan for late-season Thursday games, sources said. The vote also would relax limits on the number of games each team can play on short rest each season.

Both measures would give schedule-makers more flexibility to avoid meaningless games with sub-.500 teams for Prime’s “TNF” window. Historically, the NFL’s Thursday night package has struggled with these types of low-interest games.

Specifically, the measure awaiting owners would permit the league to:

  • Shift Sunday afternoon games to Thursday nights in weeks 14-17, with 15 days’ notice.
  • Schedule teams for Thursday games after a previous Sunday game twice in the same season, up from the current limit of once. – via Sports Business Journal

So we’ll still have to suffer through awful Thursday games in the first 13 weeks. But at least the last month could be fun. Whether or not players are happy with the proposed new rule, however, is a whole different story.