Now The NFL Network Has Everything....

                            

"Got NFL games?"
"No...not on now man."
"It be a lot cooler if you did!"

The NFL announced that their NFL network will televise 8 games next year.  These games will be played on Thursday and Saturdays.  The first game will be on Thanksgiving night [a third game added to the normal Dallas and Detroit games]...then they'll televise games each for the remainder of the season. 

The games will be available on a local station for teams playing in the game [sort of like what happened when ESPN showed Sunday night games]. 

Tags said: "After discussing this new package of games with many potential partners, we decided it would be best presented on our own, high-quality NFL Network, which has developed so rapidly that the time had come to add live regular-season games to the programming.  In the end, we wanted these games on our network, which is devoted 24/7 to the sport of football, and not on a multi-sport network."

Which means that they already have games on ESPN [which ABC owns], NBC, CBS and Fox and the pickin's are pretty slim.  It makes sense, financially, to keep the rights to those games....since this is a new package anyways.

However, the point of all this will be to put the NFL Network on many more cable company's lineups.  Right now, the NFL Network is in 40 million homes.  The fact that these NFL games will be on this station will assuredly force companies to get the network. 

Of course, any football fan worth his meddle MUST have the NFL Network anyways.  The network first premiered two years ago on, mainly, DirecTV.  Then, NFL Total Access was pretty much the only original show on air [everything else came from NFL Films]....and it was essentially Rich Eisen running around trying to interview anyone he can grab.  Now, the show is sort of the "SportsCenter" of the NFL....getting into places that ESPN could only dream [the lockerroom hookup is awesome]. 

And, again, this shows the NFL's strength.  The NBA has had a network for quite a few years [it used to be NBA.com TV.....now just NBA TV] and only last year started showing live games.  Of course, those "live games" are just airings of other network's feeds of the games [a Laker game on NBATV may be swiped from FSN-West].  MLB is looking to launch a network soon.