Prior to 2017
NFL Network debuted Thursday Night Football on November 23, 2006, with the Kansas City Chiefs handing the visiting Denver Broncos a 19–10 Thanksgiving defeat. As part of this package, three games aired on Saturday nights, which were accordingly branded as Saturday Night Football (not to be confused with ESPN/ABC's college football telecasts of the same name, which ESPN holds a trademark in relation to),[1] with the package as a whole being promoted as the Run to the Playoffs. This format carried over to the 2007 season. Saturday games can only occur in the final weeks of the season, as the Sports Broadcasting Act of 1961, requires blackouts of professional football games—held on Friday evenings or Saturdays from mid-September through mid-December—on television stations within 75 miles (121 km) of the venue of a college or high school football game.[2][3][4][5]
Starting in 2008, NFL Network eliminated all but one of the Saturday night games and started their Thursday night package three weeks earlier. In the following season, all references to Saturday Night Football were dropped, with the entire package now being branded as Thursday Night Football, and non-Thursday games being referred to as a "special edition" of Thursday Night Football.
Beginning in 2014, the Thursday Night Football package was sub-licensed to one or more of the NFL's broadcast partners, who produced all games on behalf of NFL Network, and could simulcast selected games in the package on broadcast television.[6][7] These, by extension, included the non-Thursday games of the package, which were in turn produced by CBS (with some later produced by NBC beginning in 2016).[8] These games are intended to satisfy NFL Network's carriage agreements, which require that a quota of exclusive games be broadcast by the channel each season, while still allowing some of the games to be simulcast on network television as well.[2][4]
In 2014, CBS used the branding Thursday Night Football: Saturday Edition for these games—a branding scheme that was especially considered a misnomer when used for a game aired on a Saturday afternoon.[9][10][11][12] By 2016, the games had begun to carry the on-air branding Thursday Night Special (albeit with some fleeting references to Thursday Night Football or TNF still present in on-air graphics),[10] with Christmas Day games assigned to the Thursday Night Football package accordingly using the branding NFL Christmas Special.[13]
2017–2021
By the 2017 season, the branding NFL Network Special was adopted for non-Thursday TNF games exclusive to NFL Network. The games continued to have similar productions to games aired under the Thursday Night Football title, but with their on-air graphics only containing NFL Network branding (rather than being co-branded with the logos of both NFL Network and the host broadcaster).
Beginning in 2018, most NFL Network Special games became Fox productions as part of its new rights to Thursday Night Football. An exception was an NFL London Game on October 10, 2021, which was instead produced by CBS.
2022–present
Amazon Prime Video holds rights to Thursday Night Football beginning in the 2022 NFL season. There will still be a package of exclusive games on NFL Network, generally consisting of international games airing at 9:30 a.m. ET, and late-season Saturday games.[14] NFL Network now markets the broadcasts as its "exclusive game series",[15] branding the late-season Saturday games with distinct titles such as Saturday Showdown (Late Season Saturday games),[16] and the Holiday Classic (Christmas Eve/Day games). Production of the games was taken back in-house, and a new graphics package by Two Fresh Creative replaced the Thursday Night Football-centric branding used prior.[17][18]
In Week 16 of 2023, NFL Network added a Sunday night game on Christmas Eve in lieu of usual broadcaster NBC (which is airing a afternoon game that Saturday before on December 23), due to the latter producing a Peacock-exclusive game later that same day.
