Thursday Night Football
Thursday Night Football is the branding used for broadcasts of National Football League games that broadcast primarily on Thursday nights. Most of the games kick off at 8:15 Eastern Time.
Debuting on November 23, 2006, the telecasts were originally part of NFL Network's Run to the Playoffs package, which consisted of eight total games broadcast on Thursday and Saturday nights during the latter portion of the season. Since 2012, the TNF package has begun during the second week of the NFL season; the NFL Kickoff Game and the NFL on Thanksgiving are both broadcast as part of NBC Sports' Sunday Night Football contract and are not included in Thursday Night Football.
In 2014, the NFL shifted the package to a new model to increase its prominence. The entire TNF package would be produced by a separate rightsholder, who would hold rights to simulcast a portion of the package on their respective network. Networks have included CBS, NBC and Fox.
In 2016, the NFL also began to sub-license digital streaming rights to the broadcast television portion of the package to third-parties, beginning with Twitter in 2016, and Amazon in 2017—initially on Prime Video, and since 2018 it is also being carried freely on Amazon-owned live streaming platform Twitch.
In 2021, it was announced that Amazon had acquired the exclusive rights to Thursday Night Football beginning in the 2023 season under the NFL's new broadcasting deals, marking the first time that the NFL had sold one of its main television packages to a digital media company. As before, all of the games are also streamed for free on Twitch, and aired on local broadcast television stations in the markets of the opposing teams as per NFL rules. As with all other nationally televised games, they are also carried on radio as part of the NFL on Westwood One Sports package.
At the end of the 2025 season, Amazon announced an average of 15.3 million viewers had watched each game throughout the schedule, the highest on record.
Background
Early history
The NFL Network's coverage was not the first time that NFL games were covered on Thursday or Saturday. ABC televised occasional Thursday night games from 1978 to 1986 as part of its Monday Night Football package. Prior to the new contract, ESPN carried a handful of sporadic Thursday night games and the broadcast networks used to air several national games on Saturday afternoons in mid-to-late December after the college football regular season ended. Incidentally, the only reason the league is even allowed to televise football games on Saturday night stems from a legal loophole: the league's antitrust exemption, the Sports Broadcasting Act of 1961, was written when the NFL regular season ended in mid-December, and as such, it contains specific language that prohibits televising NFL games in most markets on Friday nights and all day on Saturdays between the second week of September and the second week of December, to protect high school and college football. Since most high school and college seasons have ended by mid-December, other than bowl games, there has been little desire to close this loophole, even though the regular season has expanded well beyond mid-December since the law's passage.In 2005, when the NFL negotiated a new set of television contracts, Comcast-owned OLN offered to pay $450 million for an eight-year contract to carry NFL prime time games. In exchange, Comcast planned to add NFL Network to its digital cable lineup. The channel was added, but NFL Network decided to air the games itself, foregoing a rights fee. The other television deals generated $3.735 billion per year over an eight-year period for CBS, Fox, NBC, ESPN and DirecTV.
As previously mentioned, Thursday Night Football debuted on November 23, 2006, with the Kansas City Chiefs handing the visiting Denver Broncos a 19–10 Thanksgiving defeat. Each of the game broadcasts were titled either Thursday Night Football or Saturday Night Football, depending on the night on which it aired. This format carried over to the 2007 season.
At its launch, the package proved highly controversial mainly due to the relative unavailability of NFL Network at the time; the league used the games as leverage to encourage television providers to carry NFL Network on their basic service tiers, rather than in premium, sports-oriented packages that required subscribers to pay a higher fee; although, as with all other national cable telecasts of NFL games, the league's own regulations require the games to be syndicated to over-the-air television stations in the local markets of the teams. These issues were magnified in 2007, when a game between the New England Patriots and New York Giants that saw the Patriots defeat the Giants to close out a perfect regular season was simulcast nationally on both CBS and NBC, in addition to NFL Network and the local stations that the game was sold to, following concerns from politicians and other critics.
Starting in 2008, NFL Network eliminated all but one of the Saturday night games and started their Thursday night package three weeks earlier. This was done to accommodate the earlier schedule and the league's antitrust exemption that prohibits Saturday games from being held for most of the season. In the following season, all references to Saturday Night Football were dropped, and any games that are not played on Thursday have since been branded as "special editions" of Thursday Night Football, and later Thursday Night Special or NFL Network Special.
As part of new media contracts taking effect in the 2012 season, the Thanksgiving primetime game was moved from NFL Network to NBC's Sunday Night Football package.
During Super Bowl week in 2012, it was announced that the Thursday Night Football package would expand from eight to 13 games and air on NFL Network, again soliciting and rejecting offers from Turner Sports and Comcast. For the four seasons from 2012 to 2016, and again in 2020 and 2021 all 32 teams played a Thursday game following a Sunday game that guarantees each team a nationally televised game with 26 of them playing on Thursday Night Football and the other six playing on Thanksgiving. In addition, matchups are created with the intent to minimize travel in the leadup to the Thursday game. In general, the road team will play a home game the Sunday prior, while the home team will either play at home or a road game against a nearby opponent the Sunday before hosting the Thursday game. However, there will be instances where the road team comes in having played a road game the Sunday prior in a nearby city that makes it possible for teams from far away to play each other on Thursday, as well as consolidate long road trips for the road team.
For the 2012 season, a Spanish-language broadcast was added as second audio program.
2014–2015: partnership with CBS Sports
In January 2014, it was reported that the NFL was planning to sub-license a package of up to eight Thursday Night Football games to another broadcaster for the 2014 season. The NFL had negotiated with its existing broadcast partners, along with Turner Sports. These eight games were to be simulcast by NFL Network, and reports indicated that ESPN planned to place the games on ABC in the event it won the rights, bringing the NFL back to ABC for the first time since Super Bowl XL and the move of Monday Night Football to ESPN in 2006. The remaining games would remain exclusive to NFL Network, in order to satisfy carriage agreements with television providers guaranteeing a minimum number of games to air exclusively on the channel. The decision came as the league wished to heighten the profile of its Thursday night games, which had suffered from relatively lower viewership and advertising revenue in comparison to other games.On February 5, 2014, the NFL announced that CBS had acquired the partial rights to TNF for the 2014 season. Under the agreement, all of the Thursday Night Football telecasts would be produced by CBS Sports and called by CBS's primary announcing team of Jim Nantz and Phil Simms. The first eight games of the season were simulcast nationally on NFL Network and CBS; the remaining games in the package only aired nationally on NFL Network, but per league broadcast policies, were simulcast on local stations in the participating teams' markets. CBS affiliates were given right of first refusal to air the local simulcast before it is offered to another station. A Saturday doubleheader was also added on Week 16: NFL Network aired the early game, while CBS aired the second, prime time game.
The NFL considered CBS's bid to be the most attractive, owing to CBS's overall ratings stature, a commitment to aggressively promote the Thursday games across its properties, and its plans to utilize CBS Sports' top NFL talent and production staff across all of the games in the package to ensure a major improvement in quality over the previous, in-house productions. CBS staff also cited experience with its joint coverage of the NCAA Men's basketball tournament with Turner Sports as an advantage in its collaboration with NFL Network staff, as talent from both networks collaborate on pre-game, halftime and post-game coverage. During the games, a distinct graphics package co-branded with both CBS and NFL Network logos was used, certain players on each team wore microphones, and 4K cameras were used to allow zoom-in shots during instant replays.
With the move of selected games to CBS, media executives expected more major match-ups to appear on Thursday Night Football than in previous years in order to attract better viewership; in the past, Thursday Night Football had been criticized for often featuring games between lesser and poorer-performing teams. CBS and the NFL unveiled the games scheduled for Thursday Night Football in April 2014; CBS's slate of games featured a number of major divisional rivalries, including New York Giants–Washington, Green Bay–Minnesota, and its opening game on September 11, 2014, featuring the Pittsburgh Steelers and the Baltimore Ravens.
In the wake of the controversy surrounding Ravens player Ray Rice, changes were made to pre-game coverage on the first game in order to accommodate additional interviews and discussion related to the incident. Among these changes were the removal of an introductory segment featuring Rihanna performing her song "Run This Town". Following complaints by Rihanna on Twitter regarding the removal, the song was pulled entirely from future broadcasts.
The rights were negotiated under a one-year contract valued at $275 million; on January 18, 2015, the NFL announced that it would renew the arrangement with CBS for the 2015 season, with its value increasing to around $300 million.