FMIA: Thursday Night Football flex, Roger Goodell’s contract and the latest from the NFL owners meetings

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FMIA: Thursday Night Football flex, Roger Goodell's contract and the latest from the NFL owners meetings - ProFootballTalk

Peter King uses on-the-ground reporting from Phoenix, Arizona to provide updates from the NFL owners meetings where a number of proposals will be debated.

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FMIA: Thursday Night Football flex, Roger Goodell’s contract and the latest from the NFL owners meetings​

PHOENIX, Az. – This morning at the annual NFL Meetings at the Arizona Biltmore hotel, NFL owners and top club officials will hear from the future. The future is a man named David Ellison, the CEO of a film and media company called Skydance Media, which will partner with the league and media arm, NFL Films to create the kind of content the NFL believes is the future.

Imagine a motion picture in theaters, or streaming in your home, with John David Washington and Michael B. Jordan starring as NFL players Kenny Washington and Woody Strode, two of the four men who integrated pro football a year before Jackie Robinson broke the baseball color barrier. It’s the kind of story the NFL believes was never told with the Hollywood flair that the Robinson tale got.

NFL Films has been a vivid storyteller for decades. But the NFL has never been associated with the kind of scripted motion pictures, documentaries and star-driven projects that Skydance—one of the producers of “Top Gun: Maverick”—can do. This is the message Ellison will bring to the league today in a conversation with Ross Ketover of NFL Films. By the way, NFL Films is on board with the new venture, and will be part of the movie- and doc-making.

“We believed,” the NFL’s chief media and business officer Brian Rolapp said Sunday at the Biltmore, “that with how fans are watching the content they love, increasingly on all these streaming platforms, that football and sports was underrepresented relative to the demand that people want. So we said, ‘Let’s find somebody who sees the world the way we do and wants to create the world’s best sports content studio for scripted and unscripted content. Mainly focused on football, but also focused on any sports.”

Skydance debuts “Air,” the Michael Jordan/Nike story, this week. The example I gave of the movie about the Rams and Browns breaking the color barrier in football is just a figment of my imagination, but stories like that one are what the NFL and Skydance want. One other aspect of the partnership will be to spread NFL stories to a global audience, to viewers who haven’t been turned onto the NFL yet. One NFL executive told me the most important part of the partnership will be spreading NFL appeal to the globe.

This isn’t only a long-range plan, Rolapp said. “I think you’ll see some things this year, announcements of things we’re doing. Now we have an infrastructure to actually go make these great projects we’ve been thinking of.”

The annual meetings aren’t overflowing with news this spring. Bringing NFL projects to the big screen, and the small streaming screens, will be a venture worth watching.

On the agenda here and elsewhere, 32 days before the next tentpole event, the draft:

I’m a Thursday flex skeptic. I think it’ll take a lot of Goodell arm-twisting to pass.

I’m a bigger skeptic on football turning into rugby. But I don’t have a vote, and so it goes.

Roger Goodell’s contract will get extended. That should not be a surprise.

I’ve got a not-so-dark-horse for his successor. Likely to be later rather than soon.

Great Dan Snyder line by one team exec here Sunday: “It’s been a pox on our house now for a couple years, and it looks like it’ll continue.” No action on the potential Snyder sale is expected, but I did find out one interesting thing Sunday: As of now, the sale price is shy of the $7 billion Snyder reportedly was hoping for. What a surprise. He’s been such a great steward of this fine franchise.

Hearing good things about Bryce Young after his pro day last week. One team believes he plays bigger than his diminutive size.

Nothing going on with Lamar Jackson. I mean, the trail of news about Jackson has gone drier than an Arizona gulch.

Punters are invisible people too. Man, the league’s trying to make punts and punters and punt returners go away.

RIP, Jerry Green. Dick Vitale got all emotional remembering his friend.

I might argue that Cam Newton talks a much better game than he plays.

Mel Kiper, national treasure.

Eli Saslow, national journalism treasure.

On with the show.

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