By issuing one short press release over the weekend, the National Football League transformed its NFL Network from a luxury item for hard-core football fanatics into a channel even casual fans will demand.

The league announced that the NFL Network will broadcast eight games on Thursday and Saturday nights during the 2006 season, meaning that for the first time in its history, the league can televise games without having to rely on one of its network partners as a middleman.

The NFL will forego hundreds of millions of dollars in rights fees, but it has calculated that revenue from selling commercials directly to advertisers, money that cable and satellite providers pay for NFL Network, and the value of having final say over its broadcasts will more than make up for any loss of revenue. The new package will include five Thursday night games, beginning on Thanksgiving, and Saturday night games during the last three weeks of the season. Although the league will not release its schedule until April, the first game on NFL Network is expected to feature the Washington Redskins and Dallas Cowboys.

“This turns the NFL Network into a serious force to be reckoned with,” said Robert Thompson, professor of television and popular culture at Syracuse University. “If you’re really going to make the brand of the NFL Network mean something, you’re going to have to have some NFL games on it.”

Time Warner Cable, which does not carry NFL Network, will almost certainly start offering it in time for the 2006 season, lest it lose football fans to satellite television, currently the only way to see NFL Network in New York. NFL Network is in less than 40 million television homes, but the buzz surrounding the new package of games will cause demand to skyrocket.

When NFL Network launched, on November 4, 2003, many assumed it would merely serve as a bland public relations vehicle for the league. But from the outset, NFL Network has produced credible and even skeptical reporting. In recent weeks, studio host Rich Eisen has directed harsh criticism toward the league’s referees, who have made some high-profile mistakes during the playoffs. Commentator Adam Schefter, a respected journalist who previously wrote for the Denver Post, frequently reports on contract holdouts, suspensions, arrests, and other stories that could potentially embarrass the league.

NFL Network has not announced who its game announcers will be, but Sterling Sharpe, the former Green Bay Packers star who provides analysis on some of NFL Network’s studio shows, is a likely candidate for the commentator’s role. Sharpe often criticizes athletes who he says lack the work ethic he had as a player.

In 2006, the NFL will make almost $4 billion from its network contracts. That includes approximately $1.1 billion from ESPN for Monday Night Football, $700 million from DirecTV for its Sunday Ticket package (which gives subscribers access to every Sunday afternoon game), $700 million from Fox for Sunday afternoon NFC games,$600 million from CBS for Sunday afternoon AFC games, and $600 million from NBC for Sunday night games. By selling the Thursday-Saturday package, the league could have made a few hundred million dollars more. Cable giant Comcast expressed interest in purchasing the rights to the games as a means of creating an all-sports network to compete with ESPN. According to the Hollywood Reporter, an unnamed Internet company also made a serious proposal to broadcast the games online.

The NFL’s decision to go it alone is another step toward a future in which leagues and teams televise their own games, as the Yankees did when they created the YES Network, rather than selling the rights to other networks. Despite the huge sums of money the NFL rakes in from its network partners, the league and the networks have at times had strained relationships, most publicly when the league objected to ESPN’s dramatic series “Playmakers,” which featured professional football players engaged in domestic violence and drug use. Despite solid ratings, ESPN canceled “Playmakers” to appease the NFL. On its own network, the league doesn’t have to worry about the portrayal of football players – even fictional ones.

Although fans will love having additional games to watch, there are some drawbacks. One is that fans who don’t have cable or satellite television can’t see the new package of eight games – just as they can’t see the 18 games a year ESPN televises. If the Giants or Jets play a Thursday or Saturday night game, a local broadcast affiliate will make it available to anyone in New York with an antenna. But local fans of the 30 other teams will be out of luck if they don’t have NFL Network. For fans with cable, the addition of NFL Network will likely cause their bills to increase.

The new contract could also affect negotiations surrounding the league’s collective-bargaining agreement. Two years remain under the current deal, but if a new agreement is not reached before the 2007 season, the league would play without a salary cap, something the owners desperately want to avoid. When the television money came solely from network partners, the owners and the players union agreed on a fixed percentage of the revenues going toward player salaries. But the union and the owners will have a hard time agreeing on how much of the revenue from NFL Network will go to players.

One implication of Thursday night games that the NFL hasn’t addressed is fantasy football. Once dismissed as a small pocket of stat geeks, fantasy football players have become a huge portion of the NFL’s fan base, and most fantasy players finalize their rosters on Friday afternoons. Regular Thursday games will annoy this ever growing segment of the football-watching community, but not enough to turn them away from the NFL.

Those concerns aside, by the time Thanksgiving rolls around, football fans will be too happy about the opportunity to see games on Thursday, Saturday, Sunday, and Monday to have many complaints. The NFL Network, though, will have to find a new catch phrase. Its current slogan is “Everything But the Game.”

Mr. Smith is a regular writer for FootballOutsiders.com.