TNF Cast: Who are they?

Everything you need to know about TNF Cast, Coverage, Radio Coverage, Post game and all are contained in this article.

TNF Cast

The name “Thursday Night Football,” which is frequently shortened to “TNF,” is the branding that is used for broadcasts of National Football League (NFL) games that are primarily broadcast on Thursday nights. The majority of the games begin at 8:15 o’clock Eastern Time (8:20 prior to 2022).

In the past, certain games from the package, as well as select games from the NFL International Series, have been broadcast on Saturdays during the latter part of the season. This package also includes both domestic and international games (these games were branded since 2017 as NFL Network Special).

The telecasts made their debut on November 23, 2006, and they were initially a part of the NFL Network’s Run to the Playoffs package. This package consisted of eight total games that were broadcast on Thursday and Saturday nights (five on Thursdays, and three on Saturdays, which were originally branded as Saturday Night Football) during the latter portion of the regular season. The NFL Kickoff Game and the NFL on Thanksgiving are both broadcast as part of NBC Sports’ Sunday Night Football contract and are not included in Thursday Night Football, although the Thanksgiving primetime game was previously a part of the package from 2006 until 2011. Since 2012, the TNF package has begun during the second week of the NFL season.

In order to give the package a more prominent role, the NFL switched to a new format in the year 2014. A separate rightsholder would be responsible for producing the entire TNF package. This rightsholder would also have the ability to simultaneously broadcast a portion of the TNF package on their own network. CBS was the first rightsholder to use this model, and they aired nine games on broadcast television. The remaining games in the package were produced to be shown exclusively on NFL Network. This was done to satisfy the carriage agreements that CBS had with NFL Network. The package also included a new Saturday doubleheader that would be split between CBS and NFL Network, and it was extended all the way through Week 16 of the season. CBS and NFL Network announced on January 18, 2015 that they would continue their previous arrangement for another season. With the addition of NBC as a second rightsholder alongside CBS in 2016 and 2017, the National Football League maintained a similar arrangement for both years, with each network airing five games on broadcast television individually. The rights were acquired by Fox in 2018, and they will remain in their possession through the 2022 season.

The National Football League (NFL) started sub-licensing digital streaming rights to the broadcast television portion of the package to third parties in 2016. These sub-licenses started with Twitter in 2016 and continued with Amazon in 2017, initially on Prime Video and later being carried freely on Twitch, which is owned by Amazon and is a live streaming platform.

Under the terms of the National Football League’s (NFL) new broadcasting deals, it was announced in 2021 that Amazon had purchased the exclusive rights to broadcast Thursday Night Football beginning with the 2023 season. This marked the first time that the NFL had sold one of its primary television packages to a digital media company. Amazon has been given the right to broadcast NFL games beginning in 2022 after NFL Network and Fox agreed to hand over the final season of the current contract to Amazon. According to the regulations of the NFL, all of the games are televised on local broadcast television stations in the respective markets of the two competing teams, in addition to being streamed live for free on Twitch.

As is the case with all other games that are shown nationally on television, these games are also broadcast on the radio as part of a package called the NFL on Westwood One Sports.

Coverage

Mariucci and Nate Burleson will handle the coverage, and Stark will be on the sideline. They were replaced by Eisen and Joe Thomas for the Texans-Buccaneers game, which was the first game of the tripleheader in 2019, while Fox’s B-Team of Kevin Burkhardt, Charles Davis, and Pam Oliver called the Rams-49ers game, which was the third game of the 2019 Saturday tripleheader. Menefee and Mariucci were both removed from Saturday coverage in 2019.

Tirico was supposed to call Saturday games again in 2020, but after Al Michaels was unable to pass the NBC protocols for COVID-19, Tirico was moved to the Sunday Night Football broadcasting booth instead. Warner and Joe Davis took over the Saturday broadcasting duties instead. CBS produced the 2021 NFL London Game with Greg Gumbel and Adam Archuleta, Joe Davis and Kurt Warner paired up again for the Raiders vs. Browns game in week 15 and the Colts vs. Cardinals game in week 16, Kevin Burkhardt and Greg Olsen worked the Colts vs. Patriots game in week 15 and the TNF game between the 49ers and Titans in week 16, and Greg Olsen and Kevin Burkhardt worked

After Amazon’s attempts to entice Troy Aikman away from Fox for a full-time role on Thursday Night Football were unsuccessful (both Joe Buck and Aikman ultimately left Fox for ESPN and Monday Night Football instead), the company hired Al Michaels and Kirk Herbstreit, an analyst for ESPN’s college football coverage, to serve as its lead broadcast team. The next year, in July 2022, Amazon hired Kaylee Hartung, a reporter who had previously worked for ESPN and ABC News, to serve as a sideline reporter.

Pregame, halftime and postgame coverage

NFL GameDay Kickoff, which broadcast live from the site of each game and featured Colleen Wolfe as its host, along with Joe Thomas, Michael Irvin, and Steve Smith Sr., or other NFL Network colleagues as analysts, preceded the broadcasting of each game that was shown on NFL Network. In most cases, the program starts two hours before the start of the game (6:00 p.m. ET). Later on, the NFL Network debuted a second studio show called TNF First Look at the beginning of the afternoon. Andrew Siciliano was the host of this show.

Thursday Night Kickoff, which featured James Brown, Bill Cowher, and Deion Sanders as hosts and was broadcast simultaneously on both NFL Network and CBS, came on right before CBS games. NBC games were preceded by Football Night in America, which was later renamed in reference to the host city of the game, such as Football Night in Tampa. The show was hosted by Liam McHugh, Tony Dungy, and Rodney Harrison, and it was also simulcast on NBC and NFL Network. The pregame teams from NBC and CBS were frequently joined by the NFL Network’s crew for coverage of pregame events. During the games, NBC and CBS will join NFL Network in broadcasting the pregame coverage beginning at 7:30 p.m. Eastern Time.

This led to some controversy among viewers and the producers of syndicated programming in the locally programmed timeslot before network primetime. In this timeslot, the pre-game affects programs such as Wheel of Fortune, Jeopardy!, and Entertainment Tonight (all of which are distributed by CBS’s sister syndication division CBS Media Ventures), along with several other programs, which then require pre-emption or slotting on lower-profile alternate time slots or stations to air in markets where the pre-game is broadcast. In addition

Fox NFL Thursday would air the night before each game that was broadcast on Fox. In 2018, it was hosted by Michael Strahan, who was joined by the analysts Terry Bradshaw and Howie Long, as well as the insider Jay Glazer. Because Fox’s pregame became the primary pregame show for TNF, the NFL Network crew decided not to join Fox’s coverage of the game before it started, in contrast to CBS and NBC. In 2019, Strahan continued to serve as the show’s host, but Bradshaw and Long took turns serving as analysts alongside Tony Gonzalez and insider Peter Schrager. Long also participated in rotating shifts as an analyst. Additionally, Rob Gronkowski was signed by Fox to appear on the show as a guest star.

Because of Strahan’s obligations to the morning show Good Morning America on ABC, the program was broadcast from New York City, with studio segments coming from the studios of Fox News Channel rather than the studios of Fox Sports in Los Angeles. This was done to accommodate Strahan’s schedule conflicts. In light of the COVID-19 epidemic, the pre-game program was relocated to Los Angeles, and Curt Menefee took over as the show’s primary host. Due to his commitments with Good Morning America during the season, Strahan appeared on the show via remote. Before the 2021 season, Gonzalez departed Fox in order to seek other opportunities in the film and television industries.

TNF Tonight, which is broadcast from the game site and presented by Charissa Thompson, Ryan Fitzpatrick, Tony Gonzalez, and Richard Sherman, along with contributions from Andrew Whitworth, Taylor Rooks, and Michael Smith, comes on before the games that are shown on Amazon.

Radio coverage

As with all other national games, Westwood One offers radio broadcasts of Thursday Night Football games as part of their national radio package for the NFL. Play-by-play duties are handled by Ian Eagle, and Tony Boselli is in charge of color analysis.