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Roger Goodell recently took the stand in the ongoing lawsuit against NFL Sunday Ticket, defending the package as a “premium product”.
In part of his testimony, he offered some particularly critical comments on NFL Network’s production of Thursday Night Football.
Of course, NFL Network was the exclusive broadcast home of Thursday Night Football from 2006-13 before the league sold the set of games to other networks. From 2014-2016, the games were split between CBS and NBC.
On the stand, Goodell says that this was due to the poor production quality when the games were exclusively on NFL Network. He then likened this situation to why the league sold its package of out-of-market Sunday afternoon games at an inflated price, which is the crux of the ongoing Sunday Ticket lawsuit.
“I had my own opinion that our production was below standards that the networks (Fox and CBS) had set. We had not met that standard,” Goodell said of NFL Network via AP News.
Thursday Night Football games are now on Amazon Prime, which showed some positive growth in viewership year-over-year last season compared to the 2022-23 season, its first year broadcasting the product.
Goodell’s comments make sense when considering how much the league has moved away from broadcasting exclusively on the NFL Network.
NFL Network is now only home to the International Series games and late-season Saturday night games. In total, just seven games were on the network last season, and none did particularly well in terms of ratings.
With the NFL moving to bring on more streaming services, the need for the NFL Network to be around for game broadcasts is becoming less significant.
The future of NFL Network is also seemingly in question at the moment, as the network appears to be abandoning original programming amidst layoffs.
[AP News]
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