By Mike Jones, Nick Kosmider and Daniel Popper

NFL owners on Monday passed a resolution that will allow the league to flex Sunday games to Thursday nights with a 21-day notice, the league announced during a Monday afternoon news conference.

The move offers the league another tool to make Thursday night matchups on Amazon Prime more compelling and allows officials to make such a move during a shorter window of time. Previously, flexing a game had to be done 28 days in advance.

Reducing the window from 28 to 21 days gives the NFL a chance to see an extra week of contests before deciding whether to flex games, officials said.

Last season, the NFL flexed the Week 16 game between the Denver Broncos and L.A. Chargers to Thursday night, making that game with playoff implications a nationally televised contest and treating spectators to a more compelling matchup.

The Denver-L.A. game would have originally reached only 10-15% of the country, but the flex to Thursday night allowed the league to reach a larger-than-expected national audience, NFL officials said Monday.

The league also announced the renewal of its deal with HBO for “Hard Knocks.” The move includes both the August preseason series and the in-season series introduced in 2021. The NFL hasn’t yet settled on participants for the August “Hard Knocks” series, but it’s expected that the team will be settled on later this spring.

The league is engaging in separate conversations regarding the offseason edition of “Hard Knocks,” which began with the Giants in 2024. No determination has been made on those participants yet, according to league officials.

TNF flex has some strategic benefits …

The flex last season made the Broncos a Thursday night road team for the second time. Denver agreed to the scheduling charge, in part because it created extra rest ahead of their game the following week against the Cincinnati Bengals. — Nick Kosmider, Broncos beat writer

… but it can be complicated for fans

After the league flexed the Denver-Los Angeles game last season from Sunday, Dec. 22, to Thursday, Dec. 19, The Athletic spoke and messaged with dozens of Chargers fans whose plans had been impacted by the change.

One fan, August Sage, said he had planned to attend the game with his son, Gabe, who is in the Army and stationed in Kansas. Gabe’s military leave started on Dec. 20, according to Sage, so they could not attend the game after it was flexed.

This was just one of several examples of affected plans. NFL executive vice president of media distribution Hans Schroder said Monday that the league anticipated disruption with local ticket holders when they announced the flex. A question that went unanswered in Monday’s news conference: What message does this send to those Chargers fans whose plans were disrupted? — Daniel Popper

(Photo: Nick Cammett / Getty Images)