American football league the NFL is fully committed to its much-criticised Thursday Night Football franchise, according to commissioner Roger Goodell.
Speaking at his pre-Super Bowl press conference in Houston yesterday (Wednesday), Goodell was asked about the future of Thursday Night Football amid concerns from players and fans over issues such as increased injury risk from the turn-around of games and the quality of play in the match-ups selected.
The 2016 season saw all 32 teams feature in Thursday games, while it also debuted the league’s targeted ‘tri-cast’ distribution model of broadcast, cable and digital platforms. Social media company Twitter was selected as the NFL’s exclusive partner to deliver a live over-the-top digital stream of Thursday Night Football games to a global audience across all devices and for free during the course of the 2016 regular season.
Twitter streamed the 10 Thursday Night Football games broadcast by the NBC and CBS networks, which were also simulcast on cable television broadcaster NFL Network.
Goodell said: “Thursday Night Football is something that we are very committed to. Thursday Night Football ended up being the No.2 rated show on all of primetime on NBC this year and No.4 on CBS. So we see our fans reacting positively to that.
“There is a lot of discussion about the safety of the game, but we have seen absolutely no indications that there is any further risk of injuries, and injury rates are actually slightly lower on Thursday night than they are on Sunday. When it relates to the quality of the game, we’ve seen that be incredibly positive also. We’ve seen less turnovers. We’ve seen less penalties on almost every aspect of what you would say the quality of the game. We’ve seen high quality football on Thursday night.”
However, the commissioner said the league will assess the Thursday Night Football format and is prepared to make changes.
He added: “We put all 32 teams on there. We are thinking about whether we re-evaluate that and maybe don’t have quite the number of teams and maybe even change the staggering of our Thursday night games so you have consecutive games on CBS, consecutive games on the NFL Network and then consecutive games on NBC.
“We’ve heard from our fans a great deal, ‘Where is the game? We want to know where the game is.’ So we are going to look at all of that, and continue to work on something that we think has gotten off to an incredible start and we are very optimistic about the future on that.”