When the NFL announced the 2024 schedule earlier this year, Al Michaels immediately praised the “exciting” Football on Thursday evening Slate and said, “I can give you a great storyline for any of these games.”

Four months later, Michaels is still excited about the TNF Schedule that begins this week with a great duel between the Miami Dolphins and their AFC East rival, the Buffalo Bills.

Michaels, 79, had criticized Amazon Prime TNF schedule in the past, once comparing commentating on a game between bad teams to selling a “used car.” Many fans agreed that Thursday’s games were not the crème de la crème of the NFL.

The 2024 schedule includes a number of exciting matches. Michaels has a theory as to why the TNF Slate is significantly improved. He said The New York Post He believes the NFL better understands the importance of streaming games.

“At the beginning of the first year, it wasn’t so much my dissatisfaction with the actual schedule, but with the way the games were playing out,” said Michaels (via The publisher). “We had this Indianapolis-Denver game and a Washington-Chicago game, and those were not games that NFL Films will ever remember.

“Last year was significantly better, and this year is even better – by far the best of all, and I think that has a lot to do with where the business is right now. Streaming is becoming more and more important,” Michaels said. “The curve is pointing up on streaming, and I don’t want to say down on linear streaming, because the NFL is so powerful right now and linear is still very, very important, but there’s a lot of betting on streaming right now.”

Earlier this year, Netflix announced a deal to broadcast NFL Christmas Day games for the next three years, including two in 2024 and at least one in 2025 and 2026. And Peacock’s stream of the Green Bay Packers’ game against the Philadelphia Eagles from Brazil drew 14.2 million viewers across all NBC platforms, roughly double the number of viewers for Peacock’s regular-season game last year.

“The league now understands that the business is going in that direction,” Michaels said. “How quickly it will go there, I don’t know.”

(The New York Post)