The NFL has made a significant rule change for ‘Thursday Night Football’ that should make every owner, coach, executive, player and fan happy.
According to NFL Network’s Tom Pelissero, the team owners just approved a new Thursday Night Football “flex” rule that allows the league to move a Sunday game into the TNF slot “with 21 days’ notice.”
As Pelissero noted, previous flex rules allowed the league to flex Thursday night games 28 days in advance. The new rule shortens that window to three weeks, meaning fans will be treated to (hopefully) far better TNF games going forward.
Source: NFL owners passed a resolution allowing the league to flex Sunday games to Thursday night with 21 days’ notice.
Just one game was flexed over the past two seasons via a temporary resolution that allowed it with 28 days’ notice. Today’s vote keeps TNF Flex in the toolbox.
— Tom Pelissero (@TomPelissero) March 31, 2025
The Denver Broncos’ Week 16 road game against the Los Angeles Chargers was flexed into Thursday Night Football in place of the Cleveland Browns-Cincinnati Bengals game. At the time, the Broncos and Chargers were in the AFC playoff race, and both went on to earn wild card berths.
At the time of the Thursday Night Football flex announcement, the Bengals (4-7) and Browns (2-8) were among the worst teams in the AFC. The Browns finished 3-4, while the Bengals caught fire down the stretch to finish just outside the playoffs with a 9-8 record.
In 2023, the NFL introduced a new “flexing” system that allows them to switch out the ‘Monday Night Football’ schedules as well.
Quality Of Thursday Night Football Will Hopefully Improve Now
If you watched most Thursday night games on Amazon Prime Video over the last three years, you’ll notice that play-by-play man Al Michaels often sounded tired and bored. Well, can you really blame him considering how many lackluster games he and Kirk Herbstreit had to call?
The quality of Thursday night games will hopefully improve now that the league can eliminate dull prime-time matchups and replace them with juicer games. I mean, remember when we had to watch the Seattle Seahawks defeat the Chicago Bears 6-3 at Soldier Field?
