CBS lands NFL Thursday night football; what this means for ‘Big Bang Theory,’ others

Ladies and gentlemen, here is just what we needed (ugh): More NFL football on primetime TV. Why can’t this just be on ESPN or another sports network? While we complain about it, it’s pretty easy to figure out why this is not the case: Networks know that football makes money, and we’re going to be continually inundated with it until potentially the day when everyone stops playing it (though that doesn’t seem to be at any point in the near future).

In a statement today, it was announced that CBS has won the rights to air eight NFL games on Thursday nights during the season, which means that they have pretty much won the night already for most of the fall. In turn, this also means that there will probably need to be some pretty substantial changes that need to be made to their schedule. “The Big Bang Theory” is a beast on Thursdays already, and you also have some other shows like “The Millers” and “The Crazy Ones,” which at least perform decently.

What would we do if we were programming the network here? Our simple answer would be to just either move “The Big Bang Theory” to Monday nights at 9:00 p.m. for a showdown against “The Voice,” or to just air new episodes on Thursdays the rest of the season with some football breaks in there. The latter would actually ensure that there are fewer repeat weeks that would be needed during the season, and that could be a good thing for the show.

Still, it’s curious that CBS decided to pursue this heavily given that they already do very well on Thursdays, whereas a network like Fox or NBC could have really benefited from it.

Les Moonves had the following to say about the big addition to the lineup:

“We are very pleased to build on our outstanding partnership with the NFL by expanding our coverage to Thursday nights. CBS is a premium content company and the NFL represents the best premium content there is. I look forward to all this new deal will do for us not only on Thursday nights, but across our entire schedule.”

The one thing we are very skeptical of if that this football will really help the rest of the schedule at all. The ratings that have come out today showed basically that the Super Bowl had no bearing at all on people watching “New Girl” or “Brooklyn Nine-Nine” in their regular timeslots, despite the heavy promotion and sampling.

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Photo: CBS