Now part of the ESPN family of networks, NFL Network will carry one ESPN’s properties as soon as next month.
The UFL announced Tuesday that a pair of games next month have been flexed from ESPN-branded networks to NFL Network. The first will be a Birmingham-Houston game on April 5, which in addition to moving from ESPN2 to NFL Network is also being rescheduled from Noon ET to 6 PM. The second will be the league’s first-ever Thursday night game on April 16, which was originally scheduled to air exclusively on ESPN+ and will remain in its 8 PM ET timeslot.
The games are the first ever UFL contests on NFL Network, which previously carried spring football games in the Alliance of American Football back in 2019. But none of the subsequent spring efforts — XFL 2.0 in 2020, the USFL of 2022-23, XFL 3.0 in 2023 and the ongoing UFL — have aired on the network.
They are also the first ESPN properties to air on NFL Network since the league-branded channel was sold to Disney in a deal announced last summer and approved earlier this year. The games will share the same production approach as all UFL games on the ESPN networks.
There are currently no additional UFL games planned for NFL Network this season, though one imagines that could change. Given the UFL move, it would not be surprising to see ESPN shift additional football programming to NFL Network, which has a long history of carrying college regular season and bowl games.
ESPN’s ownership of NFL Network became official more than a month ago, but the process of integrating the channel and its employees will not be complete for months. NFL Network staffers are not expected to officially become ESPN employees until next month, and it may be until the fall before NFL Network is part of ESPN’s direct-to-consumer offering.
