Thursday night football to Fox

BLOOMINGTON, Minn. — Fox and the NFL have agreed to a five-year deal for Thursday night football games.

Those games previously were televised by CBS and NBC, two of the league’s other network partners. Fox announced Wednesday that it will televise 11 games between Weeks 4 and 15, with simulcasts on NFL Network and Fox Deportes.

Fox, which has the Sunday afternoon NFC package, will produce all of the games under the deal, which is worth a little more than $3 billion, according to a person with direct knowledge of the terms of the deal.

“This is a single partner deal, we are not splitting the package,” NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell said in a conference call. “We had tremendous amount of interest from all the broadcast partners, all of whom wanted it exclusively. We felt this was the best opportunity for the NFL to grow the Thursday night package.”

Goodell added that “we put our focus on the broadcast package first,” and is exploring partnerships with digital outlets, also in conjunction with Fox.

“Fundamentally, Fox was built on football,” said Peter Rice, president of 21st Century Fox, nothing that 25 years ago, the NFC package “helped launch a fledgling network into what it is today.”

CBS and NBC each paid $450 million for the previous twoyear package.

Fox could have a conflict if weather causes a World Series game to be postponed from Wednesday to Thursday. In recent years, Series Game 2 and 6 have been scheduled for Wednesday.

“In that hypothetical kind of a scenario, the World Series game would stay on Fox and our Thursday night game would become an FS1/NFL simulcast,” Fox spokesman Eddie Motl said.