It’s great to have another night of football every week, it really is. I love being able to watch it as much as the next football fan. But it’s really pretty silly. Not only that, it flies in the face of nearly every other measure that the NFL has tried to put in place as far as player safety is concerned. It simply doesn’t make sense to throw players back out on the field with just three days between games.
When a league says it is so concerned with play safety, it is simply contradictory to continue playing games on such a short week. It constantly puts players in danger of suffering injuries because they have no time to recover from bumps and bruises from the previous week.
Just last week was the perfect example. Jimmy Garoppolo had a fairly serious injury, but was more or less thought of as day-to-day. However, with the Patriots next game on Thursday, there was absolutely no chance Garoppolo was going to play. Just one simple example. There are plenty of others.
The simple truth is that it doesn’t make sense to force players to consistently play on short weeks. If you want to have a problem with taking games from London, that’s fine, but it doesn’t harm player safety to play games abroad or in other cities. It may just ultimately be foolish.
Thursday Night games are more than simply foolish, they are potentially harmful to the health and well being of NFL players, something the league claims to care about a whole lot.
Creating Thursday Night Football was a pure money grab, and it always will be. The league bet that a network would pay a lot of money to broadcast another handful of games. And the NFL bet right. Not only did they bet right, they got CBS to pay $275 million a year for the first two years, and then got NBC and CBS to pay a combined $500 million this year. The networks paid the same amount for fewer Thursday night games! Add in more revenue from radio, and added inventory for NFL Network so that there are actual live games that can be played on the NFL Network and you are talking about a nice chunk of change that the NFL has raked in for these Thursday Night games.
That’s all Thursday Night Football was ever about. Money. It’s a clear and blatant cash grab. With no regard for the health and well-being of the athletes who are on the field generating that money for the league.