Thursday Night Football to move to FOX

Do you hate Thursday Night Football? You probably do. . .most people do, anyway, including most of the NFL players, from the sounds of it.

It’s a good thing that we’re going to be getting at least five more years of it, then.

Today, the National Football League announced that Thursday Night Football would be moving to FOX for the next five seasons, at a cost of $660 million a year. That’s a whole lot of money.

The contract will allow FOX to broadcast 11 Thursday Night Football games from Week 4 to Week 15 (not including Thanksgiving night, which will presumably still be on NBC). That’s the word from the story about the deal at ESPN. I don’t know what, precisely, that means for Weeks 1 through 3 as far as this deal is concerned.

Moving the games to FOX gives the network an opportunity to make the one move that could, potentially, make Thursday Night Football at least a little bit palatable. I’m talking about making Gus Johnson the full-time play-by-play voice of the new Thursday Night Football on FOX.

Johnson hasn’t been a regular in the NFL booth on FOX in some time, but his presence would give the game a little more excitement. Or, at the very least, he’d make it sound a little more exciting. It would have to be better than pushing one of the regular FOX crews in there.

Of course, my hoping for this likely means that FOX is going to end up following the lead of CBS and just recycling their #1 announcer pairing into the booth for Thursday nights, which means more Joe Buck and Troy Aikman. Hooray.

Thursday Night Football has a new home for the next few years, folks. Sure, it probably won’t make the games a whole lot better, but at least it will look a little different, I suppose.