Afternoon Edition

September 16, 2026

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This week’s clash between the Lions and Bills to begin the 2026 Thursday Night Football schedule marks the opening of Buffalo’s new Highmark Stadium and is a key part of the new season’s first month. It also shows just how far Amazon has come in its fifth year as an NFL broadcaster.

—Eric Fisher

First Up

The college football season is off to another hot start in TV ratings, as Texas and Ohio State delivered record viewership numbers for a second year in a row.
The 2027 Formula One season is scheduled to open in the Middle East despite the ongoing U.S.-Iran war in the region.
The new home for the WTA Finals through 2029 will be Charlotte, North Carolina, and the tour will relocate its global headquarters to the city from Florida.
Mike Tirico confirmed Michael Jordan won’t return to NBC as a “special contributor,” but Tirico told FOS he hopes Jordan changes his mind.

Amazon’s Bills-Lions Game Shows Streamer’s Established NFL Presence

Denny Medley-Imagn Images

Thursday night’s NFL game between the Lions and Bills, marking the opening of Buffalo’s new Highmark Stadium, is a key part of the new season’s first month and begins a league facility boom that will extend well into the 2030s.

It’s also the type of game that historically would not have been aired on Amazon.

The online retail and streaming giant, however, will carry the Lions-Bills clash between the two Super Bowl LXI contenders to begin the 2026 Thursday Night Football schedule and shows just how far Amazon has gone as an NFL broadcaster.

In the midst of a banner 2025 across the NFL for viewership, Amazon Prime Video grew its TNF audience last year by 16% to a per-game average of 15.3 million viewers, representing the highest percentage growth of any full-season league rights holder. It was also the highest audience level in the 20-year history of TNF on any network.

Since Amazon began its exclusive TNF coverage in 2022, viewership has grown by 60%, and the median viewer age of 49.4 remains nearly seven years younger than the comparable figure for linear NFL audiences.

That resulted in a situation where Amazon received the high-profile opening game for Highmark Stadium, marking the 10th venue debut called by play-by-play announcer Al Michaels across his career. Amazon’s 2026 NFL slate then features all 14 playoff teams from 2025, a trio of high-profile holiday games on Black Friday, Christmas Eve, and New Year’s Eve, and a wild-card playoff game.

“Across the board, what you’ve seen with Thursday Night Football is a general raising of the floor in terms of what the quality of the games are, week in and week out,” Amazon Prime Video head of sports partnerships Charlie Neiman tells Front Office Sports. “We always have a few monster games, and holidays are really big for us this year, but I’m most satisfied with the trajectory of an average game on a Thursday night.”

NFL VP of broadcasting planning Mike North, who annually grapples with competing requests from every rights holder, said the slates for Amazon and other broadcasters are a result of the league’s intensely analytical approach to scheduling.

“The flexibility that we secured in the last round [of rights deals] has changed this entire process,” North said after the schedule release in May. “The ability to build the schedules that we can now, it’s very data-driven. But the core principles are the same. It’s still about the biggest games in the biggest windows.”

Streaming Debate

Amazon’s return to NFL coverage for the new season also is happening amid rising tensions around the league’s continued embrace of streaming. Regulators and politicians in Washington have already escalated their scrutiny of the league, and most recently, Fox Sports president of insights and analytics Mike Mulvihill highlighted the league’s still-superior viewership on linear television.

“It’s not the first inning anymore,” Mulvihill said earlier this week in a social media post. “Putting sports exclusively on streaming has failed. [It] alienates longtime fans without reaching new ones.”

Mulvihill’s comments were primarily in the context of Netflix, which has expanded its NFL rights this year, and saw flat viewership for a Week 1 game last week from Australia. Amazon, meanwhile, points to ongoing viewership growth in not only its live games but also in its pre- and post-game coverage.

“I’ve been [at Amazon] for a decade, and I remember being in rooms with leagues and [they were] worrying about whether a streamer could handle 1 million [average viewers] and could they trust that,” Neiman says. “We had an NFL playoff game with an average audience of more than 31 million. We’ve come a very long way in a relatively short period of time.”

Across the NFL, Thursday is also continuing to be a more established part of the league’s weekly cadence, and now is a less reviled or unusual day for players and coaches—particularly as nontraditional slots such as Wednesdays become more common in scheduling.

“The NFL responds to its fans, and it’s not surprising to me that, certainly compared to a decade ago, schedule norms are changing,” Neiman says. “If there are new ways to bring games or matchups to fans, the NFL is going to explore doing so. We’re supportive of that. Black Friday is a perfect example of that. It’s become a franchise of ours, and it didn’t exist prior to our big deal [with the league]. Now, it’s an expectation for fans.”

Win $500 Toward Football Tickets

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ONE BIG FIG

Sabalenka Pays Up

Geoff Burke-Imagn Images via Reuters

$7,500

How much the US Open fined Aryna Sabalenka for smashing her tennis racket after she was defeated in the final by Elena Rybakina. Sabalenka was vying for her third straight US Open title but fell 6–4, 5–7, 6–2 to Rybakina.

“It’s really tough to control your emotions when you lose in the final of the Grand Slam and when you were trying to go for three-peat,” Sabalenka said after the match Saturday. “So I just wanted to let it go, because if I would hold it inside, right now or there on the court, I wouldn’t be able to say a word, or I would just go not really nice over there.”

Rybakina ended the tournament not just with the title but with a new world No. 1 ranking. She unseated Sabalenka before their meeting, when she reached the semifinals.

LOUD AND CLEAR

Private Equity Playground

Front Office Sports

“I understand it, but I don’t necessarily agree with it.”

—Former NFL star Ndamukong Suh on private equity’s involvement in youth sports. “They’re always gonna be looking for those returns,” Suh said during the Front Office Sports Asset Class event Tuesday.

Suh, who has two children, acknowledged there are ways private equity can play a “positive” role in youth sports but said “there needs to be a better way of doing it.” Suh told FOS he thinks investors need to find a better balance between their pursuit of returns and what’s best for young athletes.

FRONT OFFICE SPORTS LIVE

The Voice That Shaped Sports Talk

Few voices have shaped sports media quite like Christopher “Mad Dog” Russo.

A Radio Hall of Famer and one of the most influential figures in sports talk, Russo has spent more than four decades turning an unmistakable voice, rapid-fire delivery, and unfiltered passion into a broadcasting legacy. From his legendary run in sports-talk radio to Mad Dog Unleashed on SiriusXM and his regular appearances on ESPN’s First Take, Russo has helped define the way generations of fans and personalities talk about sports.

Now, he’s bringing that perspective to Tuned In next month.

Hear directly from Russo on the evolution of sports talk, the changing media landscape, and what it takes to remain relevant—and unmistakable—in an industry that never stops moving.

Don’t miss the chance to hear from one of sports media’s true originals. Secure your ticket before they’re sold out.

STATUS REPORT

Three Down, One Push

Vincent Carchietta-Imagn Images

Mets ⬇ A highly disappointing season for the MLB club, sporting the league’s No. 2 luxury-tax payroll, hit even lower depths this week as New York was officially eliminated from the National League playoffs with a Monday loss to the Orioles. The following night, former Mets star and Baltimore slugger Pete Alonso hit his 300th career home run. Though the Mets have by far MLB’s largest attendance decrease this season, frustrated fans of the team have turned out in strong numbers at Citi Field this week to cheer their former first baseman, including a long ovation for Alonso’s milestone dinger. “To have that kind of reaction to an opposing player, it’s crazy to me,” said Mets pitcher Sean Manaea. “I’ve just never seen anything like that before.”

Hyrox ⬇ The global indoor fitness competition is apologizing and changing its rules after an incident in Beijing over the weekend. Australian competitor Joanna Wietrzyk soiled herself mid-competition, but she was not removed by race organizers and completed the rest of the course, which requires competitors to move from station to station, sharing equipment such as rowing ergs and medicine balls along the way. Hyrox cofounder Moritz Fürste posted an apology on Instagram, saying in part, “Hyrox made a mistake by not reacting immediately during the race. In the end it is my job to foresee these potential incidents—and I did not.” Fürste said “there are new rules and procedures in place to prevent situations like this from happening again.”

U.S. women’s soccer ⬇ The U.S. crashed out of the FIFA U-20 Women’s World Cup’s round of 16 on Wednesday as Brazil advanced on penalty kicks. The U.S., which won three of the first six editions of the biennial tournament that began in 2002, has not reached the final since 2012. The tournament’s timing has drawn criticism from players and soccer officials because it’s held outside a FIFA international window, meaning clubs don’t have to release their players. Two NWSL players from the 2024 U.S. squad that placed third—Bay FC’s Claire Hutton and Seattle Reign FC’s Jordyn Bugg—were still young enough to play in this year’s tournament but remained with their clubs. Senior women’s coach Emma Hayes spoke in August about her concerns over player development, saying she was “worried about the direction for and the lack of all of those experiences for American players.”

FIBA Women’s Basketball World Cup ⬆⬇ The final between USA and France drew 1.2 million viewers Sunday on TNT, the third-most-watched FIBA World Cup game in history. However, two U.S. group-stage games—against Italy (1.3 million) and Czechia (1.2 million)—slightly outdrew the final. The championship game aired simultaneously against the NFL’s Week 1 slate and the US Open’s men’s final.