Thursday Night Football: Why Early-Week Game Is Essential for NFL Season

Having the NFL on television almost always scores high ratings for whichever television channel it is on. We cannot get enough NFL, as the Thursday night games are one of the best things that the NFL can do. 

For example, last week’s Sunday Night Football game with the New England Patriots taking on the New York Jets on NBC crushed in the ratings. The ratings for Adults 18-49 last week saw the NFL dominate it’s competition. Number one was Jets vs. Patriots which drew a 8.1 rating.

Let’s compare that to second place of oh yeah, Sunday Night NFL Pre-game which drew a 5.8.  

Coming in at a distant third place was CBS program The Big Bang Theory which drew a 5.3 rating, followed by Two and a Half Men, CMA Awards and then we are back to football with FOX’s The OT. 

That’s four NFL programs in the top-six of last week’s television ratings, which is an amazing feat. This accomplishment has made for big dollars for the NFL when it comes to television contracts. In their latest deal, they saw a billion dollar per-year contract with ESPN.  

With the games on Thursday night on the league’s television channel, the NFL Network, they are able to take in all of the revenue that a television broadcast brings.  

The games on Thursday night is a pain for us who do not have the NFL Network on our cable package. They expect us to pay our cable provider to get the network so that we do not miss out on our favorite teams playing. 

Which is a pain, but because we have proven to love football so much, it’s something that we end up doing.  

Going forward, the NFL will move to having more games on Thursday night. Not only will it give us something to look forward to, as waiting six-to-seven days in between games is starting to be too long.  

Thursday night football is the perfect appetizer to curb our appetite for NFL football every single week. It makes our work week a lot shorter, while giving us something to talk about on Friday before the weekend. 

I say give us more Thursday night football and give us as much NFL football as we can handle. 

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