As we discussed his feelings about playing on Thursday nights, recently retired Patriots safety Devin McCourty stopped me as I recounted his circumstances last year. Almost by accident, I’d quickly brushed over that New England actually didplay two games in 2022, and said that, with those games coming in consecutive weeks (Thanksgiving and Dec. 1), the damage was mitigated, since there was only one short week.
Turns out, even that wasn’t really cool with McCourty and his teammates.
It meant where he and other older Patriot vets would normally get the so-called “minibye,” on the back end of playing two games in five days, they’d have to wait another week instead. And that minibye would be extended by a day, then followed by a Monday-Sunday-Saturday turn, throwing a Molotov cocktail into routines players spend years curating to get themselves ready on a weekly basis.
“Usually, when we get Thursday night games, we battle it out, and Bill [Belichick] will always say, ,” McCourty said over the phone Saturday. “We didn’t get that, and that to me wasn’t normal. Because that’s what it was. We had Thursday to Thursday, then a Monday night game to a Saturday game.
“It was just so awkward. Because if you just play the Thursday night game and then you go back to a regular Sunday, to me, it becomes normal again. Like, . Once you mess that up, I think it’s harder.”
Last week at the NFL’s annual meeting, owners proposed doing more than messing that up.
They looked at throwing the whole thing into a blender.
And no less a star than Patrick Mahomes reacted quickly, and not positively.
The result, for now, is compromise. On Wednesday, owners took a proposal to allow flex scheduling for in Weeks 14 to 17, and split it into two—one that would allow for teams to play multiple games in a single season, and not always in back-to-back weeks, and another for flex scheduling. Owners voted through the former, 29–3, with the Giants, Bears and Raiders voting against it. They unofficially shot down the latter, with 22 yes votes, eight no votes and abstentions from the Panthers and Broncos.
How they got there is pretty fascinating.
The proposal for flexing games promised teams 28 days’ warning if they could be flexed and 15 days’ notice that the move was actually being made. It was approved unanimously by the broadcast committee and the ventures committee, which brought it to the floor for discussion at the Arizona Biltmore.
When it got there, Giants owner John Mara was first to speak—giving an impassioned, sometimes-angry speech about how there isn’t any need to do this and how it’d only alienate the league’s most avid fans (those who actually attend games). Bucs owner Joel Glazer, a member of the broadcast committee, countered him, while Steelers owner Art Rooney II and Bears chairman George McCaskey spoke up to back up the points Mara made.
After that, Panthers owner David Tepper asked a simple question:
It was then explained that the league had seen the audience numbers during the season’s stretch run, and there were games where the ratings weren’t just low—there were games people weren’t tuning in for at all. Tepper then told the room that he’d vote for it if the league could promise 28 days’ notice not that a game could be moved, but that it be moved (the proposal, again, offered only 15). NFL chief media officer Brian Rolapp responded that the league couldn’t promise that because of agreements with Fox and CBS.
Broncos CEO Greg Penner then said he’dvote for the proposal with 28 days’ notice. The Vikings’ Mark and Zygi Wilf asked whether the league could guarantee that, with the changes, no team would be forced to play away Sunday and again Thursday. They were told that’d be a difficult thing for the NFL to promise.
After that, Chiefs owner Clark Hunt stepped in and offered another compromise: Instead of four weeks of flexes in 2023, the league could do only two weeks. Others then asked whether they could get 28 days’ notice just two flexes for Year 1. That calmed down the room, and Eagles owner Jeffrey Lurie suggested splitting the proposal apart and voting on the two aspects of it separately.
That left everyone where they are now—with the prospect of having to play on multiple short weeks in 2023, without knowing yet whether they’ll have to do it on the fly.
