Thursday Night Football is here to stay—until the 2022 season, at least.





We can all thank Fox for that, as the company just bailed out the highly controversial prime-time broadcast by purchasing the rights from the NFL for earth-shattering numbers—beating out just about any other major competing network by a ridiculous landslide.

Fox's "Thursday Night Football" deal: Five years for around $550M per year. Sports Business Daily has the details. https://t.co/IAtByGDRyv — John Ourand (@Ourand_SBJ) January 31, 2018

If you're not too keen on the math, the following deal cracks the billion-dollar mark easily and pays out more than what NBC and CBS did combined over the past two years, which came in around $450 million a year.

$1,750,000,000: What Fox will pay to the NFL each year, on average, for the rights to Thursday Night Football and the NFC Sunday package through the 2022 season. — Darren Rovell (@darrenrovell) January 31, 2018

As per John Ourand, Fox will broadcast 11 TNF games per season, while NFL Network will also keep its rights to air games in addition to an undisclosed number of matchups that will exclusively be played on their network only. Joe Buck and Troy Aikman, Fox's main booth guys, are not planning to take over the commentating as per the report.





Viewership of the broadcast has declined with NBC and CBS publicly revealing a four percent drop in ratings from last season and 20 percent drop total from 2015. Combined with key players like Richard Sherman speaking out publicly against Thursday games, stating that the short week of preparation leads to more injuries, many networks like ESPN and Turner didn't even offer a bid while CBS and NBC decreased their offer numbers for next season.

Players complain about Thursday Night Football, but the players get 55% of the $660 million a year that FOX will pay for TNF. That adds an extra $11 million per team per year to the payroll. Anyone seriously think if the players voted on TNF, they'd vote to turn that money down? — Michael David Smith (@MichaelDavSmith) January 31, 2018

Perhaps the deal and change of network can rejuvenate an event that has its share of problems by building off of the positives, implementing more sky cam, and giving streaming services additional control of providing the entertainment.