BEVERLY HILLS — NFL commissioner Roger Goodell and CBS CEO Les Moonves could have been fined for excessive end-zone celebration when they talked to TV writers here about this season’s new “Thursday Night Football” package on CBS.
In fact, despite the $275 million CBS dropped to win the rights to televise the NFL this fall, Moonves is already seeing dollar signs.
“We pay a lot of money for football,” he said, “and we make a lot of money on football.”
“Thursday Night Football,” which makes its broadcast debut on CBS Sept. 11, “will be the biggest thing on network television this fall,” Goodell said.
CBS president and CEO Les Moonves called NFL football “the single best product on network television. … This is a sure thing.”
The new deal is for one year, so the NFL can gauge whether Thursday football can replicate its Sunday night gold mine. CBS is trying to secure pole position for the next deal, which will likely be longer term.
To maximize CBS’ football promotion, Moonves said CBS viewers can expect to see NFL themes in some of the network’s other programming this fall.
The deal runs for the first eight weeks of the NFL season, with the remaining eight Thursday games returning to the NFL Network, where the night launched in 2006.
Goodell said that while the NFL is the friendliest of all major sports to broadcast television, he expects that the “back eight,” when playoff races are heating up, will remain on the NFL’s own cable-distributed network.
The CBS Thursday broadcasts will have the same announcing team as the NFL Network’s Thursday games: Jim Nantz, Tracy Wolfson and Phil Simms.
Goodell said the biggest on-air innovation will be overhead cameras looking directly down on the sidelines and goal line.
CBS Sports president Sean McManus said 3-D experiments haven’t worked out. “The picture looks great, but it’s not a good way to watch sports,” he said. Instead, the focus will be on “super-high-def” transmission.
McManus also said the NFL will issue no instructions to the announcers, one way or the other, on how to identify the Washington team, whose Redskins nickname has been criticized as offensive to Native Americans.
The league brushed aside two other recent matters that had made headlines: whether players who played the previous Sunday don’t want to play again on Thursday, and whether the NFL has been lax in dealing with the question of long-term injuries, particularly concussions.
“My coach Bill Belichick says he likes Thursday games,” said New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft. “He says that because you don’t play again until the following Sunday, it’s almost like having another bye week.”
Goodell said the league had addressed the concussion issue forcefully. “Football has never been safer than it is today,” he said, citing better equipment and rule changes that penalize unsafe head contact.
Mainly, he said, “Kids are still playing football. It’s a great game. You learn a lot of life lessons from football.”
