On Monday, the NFL dropped a piece of news that matters very little to most people and a whole heckuva lot to a small amount of people.
In its announcement that the 2023 schedule will be released this Thursday night, the NFL also dropped the following announcements:
-- The NFL will air a Black Friday game for the first time ever.
-- Teams can be on Thursday Night Football twice.
-- Not all teams are guaranteed to have a primetime slot.
-- Teams no longer "belong" to a specific network.
That last bit is the biggest change.
If you're my age or younger, NFC road games on Fox and AFC road games on CBS is the church-and-state separation of powers in sports television. (In his excellent 2018 oral history on Fox's purchase of NFC rights, The Ringer's Bryan Curtis detailed that the deal was so successful for Fox specifically because it purchased NFC rights.)
The idea of separating conferences into different networks dates back to before the NFL-AFL merger, when CBS owned the rights to all NFL games and NBC had the AFC. Considering that the NFL hardly acknowledges its pre-Super Bowl history, networks "owning" specific conferences is essentially as old as the NFL itself.
Change is inevitable in life, and it's easy to see why the NFL made this move.
The NFL, a league that trained an entire country to build its fall and winter weekends around Sunday afternoon, has steadily devalued its Sunday afternoon packages in favor of prime time games. ESPN and ABC's Monday Night package is growing, and soon the league will flex games out of Sunday afternoons to Monday nights. As referenced above, the NFL will air its first Black Friday game this fall, an inevitable move after adding America's biggest retailer to its roster of television partners.
Those primetime games have to come from somewhere, and so Sunday afternoon (particularly the 1 p.m. ET window) has become a mere appetizer to Sunday nights and Monday nights. Depending on the prime time schedule, CBS or Fox could conceivably have any two or three games to air on a given Sunday if the rigid Fox-NFC/CBS-AFC split remained.
That said, I'm not thrilled about this if I'm CBS. The AFC has almost all the league's young quarterback talent and just added Aaron Rodgers, and so the prospect of seeing, say, Jets-Chiefs in Fox's "America's Game of the Week" window would make my stomach turn. As a regular viewer, something about a Titans-Jaguars game on Fox seems hopelessly out of place, like a Celine Dion cameo in a Kendrick Lamar song.
Now get off my lawn.
Update: Fox Sports executive Michael Mulvhill adds that teams will still have minimums on each network (the NFC on Fox and the AFC on CBS), i.e., "the Cowboys will still have twice as many games on Fox as any other network." The traditional structure will also remain intact for the playoffs -- for example, the AFC championship game will be on CBS, not Fox.