Thoughts on Thursday
How to Improve the Newest Member of the NFL Family
If you’re taking the time to read this, odds are you’re an avid NFL fan. You probably watch games that don’t involve your favorite team. Do we just love the NFL that much? Or are we hoping our QB1 doesn’t implode against our opponent’s defense? Whether it’s a pure love of the sport or our home/favorite team, an untreatable addiction to all things fantasy football, or a delectable blend of all three, the NFL has created an entertainment empire that is in a league of its own.
Ever since the NFL added Monday Night Football to its TV offerings, we have learned one, at least to this point, irrefutable truth: Everything the NFL touches turns to gold.
The birth and evolution of Monday Night Football, which itself is an interesting study, has proven now to have only been the beginning. The two traditional Thanksgiving Day games had been broadcast since the 1950’s, but the expansion to Monday night, an every-week addition to the usual Sunday afternoon slate was something completely different. There were no predictable teams involved as with Thanksgiving Day games; rather, it would present a “game of the week” feel, and the early success of the experiment, due in no small part to the original and now iconic broadcast team, fed this image and created appointment television for millions of sports fans. Celebrities would make guest appearances, its theme song was hummed in millions of cars on the Monday drive home from work, and Hank Williams, Jr.’s “Are you ready for some football?” became one of the most recognizable phrases in the English-speaking world.
In 1987, after experimenting with the idea over the previous few seasons, the NFL expanded its viewership offerings further by adding “Sunday Night Football” to the mix, a game carried exclusively on cable sports network ESPN. After a wildly successful run, Sunday Night Football moved to NBC in 2006 when ESPN took over the Monday Night Football rights. All that did was staple Sunday Night Football to the top of the primetime viewership ratings for years on end.
What started as millions turned into billions of dollars being thrown around by networks vying for anything NFL. NFL broadcast rights were gold. For revenue generation, they were akin to printing your own money. The Super Bowl alone is a cash cow like no other, and Fox, CBS, and NBC pay $3 billion a year for the rights to broadcast weekly games and a rotating right to broadcast the Super Bowl. It is a mind-blowing amount of money, and when corporations and networks see that kind of cash flying around, everyone wants in. Everyone wants a piece of the action. Time after time, the NFL has been happy to oblige.
Which brings us to our main topic of discussion today: “Thursday Night Football.” What started as an eight-game schedule in 2006 offered exclusively on the then still-hard-to-find NFL Network expanded to more traditional networks and more games in the years since. In 2021, Amazon paid around $1 billion per season to obtain exclusive
broadcasting rights for Thursday Night Football, and brought, in this writer’s opinion, the GOAT announcer Al Michaels along for good measure. This latest offering became available only to Amazon Prime subscribers, a group which at the time numbered around 80-or-so million.
The NFL described this move to streaming as a means of reaching out to a younger audience. Whatever older fans (like me) think about it, streaming is the future, and is increasingly more of the present. Expect more such moves in the future, as the highest bidder almost always wins, and it isn’t always going to be the most convenient option for consumers.
Convenient or not in its current form, Thursday Night Football is here to stay. There is far too much money involved for it to ever go away. Ratings are hard to quantify in the era of network, cable, and streaming services, but there is no arguing that if the NFL puts it on TV, millions of people will watch, even if they have to pay extra for it.
Now the discussion needs to shift.
If Thursday Night Football is here to stay, how do we make it better?
Long have been the complaints surrounding Thursday Night Football in its current form. Unprepared, undermanned teams playing on too short of a week with limited-to-no practice, insufficient time to heal from the previous week’s game or prepare for the next opponent,
logistical disadvantages for the road teams (though these have not necessarily been reflected in winning percentage), all conspiring together to produce lackluster games involving oftentimes uninspiring matchups. In a nutshell? Bad football.
Don’t get me wrong. The NFL is like pie…or another three-letter word this writer will leave to your imagination; even when its bad, its good. But if Thursday Night Football is permanent, it is incumbent upon the NFL to use its vast resources and its unmatched leverage to make the product better for the viewers, and more importantly, the game itself safer for the players.
As much as I love watching NFL games, all those complaints are valid. I’m a die-hard, and will watch any NFL game. But even that being the case, I do find most Thursday night games to be a bit of a slog, even the more compelling matchups. And it is due in large part to those factors involving time, specifically to heal and prepare. The gameplans are vanilla out of necessity, rosters are bereft of players that may have been able to suit up for Sunday but couldn’t make the quick turnaround for Thursday; they just aren’t what they should be, which is another version of “game of the week.”
Now, Thursday night is different from Sunday and Monday night offerings in one key facet in that, to ensure that every team is dealing with these Thursday night inconveniences ‘equally,’ the NFL has made the effort for every team to play a Thursday night game each season. Such is not the case with Sunday and Monday night matchups, which are selected based on key matchups between teams that are expected
to be good. It doesn’t always work out as planned, but the point is you will likely see a team like the Kansas City Chiefs, loaded with stars and expected to contend for a championship, in primetime games far more often than say, the current version of the Chicago Bears, and that’s because preparing for a Sunday or Monday night game doesn’t come with nearly the time crunches that a Sunday-to-Thursday turnaround creates. Ergo, a team playing a disproportionate amount of its games on Sunday or Monday night is not at a preparational disadvantage relative to teams that do not.
The key to making Thursday night more compelling for viewers and less taxing on players is simple: Eliminate the time crunch. The means by which to accomplish that can prove more difficult in practice than in theory, but allow me to offer up a suggestion. I’d like to thank “Skol Bros” on X (formerly Twitter) @SB23 for putting this idea in my head and coming up with some great ideas upon which I’ll expand.
J.D.’s 3-step plan to fix Thursday Night Football:
· 18 regular season games, 2 preseason games
· 2 staggered byes per team
· Thursday games ALWAYS follow byes
STEP 1: 18 regular season games, 2 preseason games
The NFL has warred with itself for years regarding preseason games. While there is no consensus on the ‘importance’ of these games, there
are certain points that both sides are dug in on. From the owners’ perspective, they aren’t giving up the gate. Period. The NFL will never play fewer total games than it does now, at least short of some unforeseen and irresistible outside force acting on it. From the players’ side, most teams have decided that few if any of their projected starters will play many meaningful preseason snaps, if they play any at all. That leads to a bunch of players that won’t make NFL rosters playing games that don’t matter. Not compelling, not interesting, and even for a die-hard fan like me, not watchable.
“But what about the guys at the end of the roster trying to make the team?”
Two preseason games are plenty. Between the hours upon hours that coaching staffs spend with their players in practice, in the film room, in meetings, in joint practices AND in preseason games, they know by the end of a second preseason game who ‘has it’ and who doesn’t. A third preseason game isn’t necessary.
“But what about player safety? 18 games increase the likelihood of injury!”
STEP 2: 2 staggered byes per team
Even in the era of hyper-focus on player safety (which I wholeheartedly support), the NFL isn’t going to cut games. There is too much at stake, too much money to be made by all parties involved, and an insatiable appetite on the part of consumers that pay for all of it to ever go backwards. So, that conversation once and for all needs to shift to, “how do we move forward in a way that is as safe as possible for the players?”
I watch a lot of “Air Disasters” on Smithsonian Channel. I’ve never been a comfortable flyer, so call it my way of ‘facing my fears.’ I liken playing in the NFL to air travel in the 60’s and 70’s; no one is forcing you to do it, odds are you’ll be ok, unless you end up not being ok, in which case we’ll enact new rules and regulations we don’t know we need yet to make it safer.
Much like air travel, player safety has come a long way from where it was. Is it perfect? Of course not. No activity involving any kind of ‘risk’ ever will be. But what has been learned over the years has led to safety advancements that have incrementally decreased the odds of negative outcomes. They will never be eliminated entirely, but ongoing efforts to increase player safety will reduce them as far as they reasonably can be. Two byes for each team would be the latest step in that ongoing effort.
The impact on the schedule would be minimal. The current schedule of 3 preseason weeks, 18 regular season weeks (17 games plus a bye), 3 playoff weeks, Pro Bowl week and the Super Bowl can be tweaked any number of different ways to accommodate an additional week from elimination of the Pro Bowl week to simply adding another week to the
NFL calendar. Trust me, the NFL won’t mind ruling TV screens across the country for another week in February.
The NFL schedule makers can be left to work their wonder on most of the details, but the basic parameters are simple. Since six teams play on Thanksgiving, the other 26 teams would require 13 weeks to play a full Thursday schedule. Let’s leave out the season opener, since the ‘less time to prepare’ argument doesn’t apply to week 1. That leaves weeks 5-18 (one week in there for Thanksgiving as well) to accommodate a full Thursday slate of games. Byes would be staggered in such a way that a team with an early bye in the first half (weeks 5-11) of the Thursday schedule also have an earlier bye in the second half (weeks 12-18). We wouldn’t want a situation where a team has byes in weeks 4 and 17 for example, or conversely weeks 8 and 10. Staggering them to allow each team a similar amount of time between byes is the fairest way to go, and it could be worked out.
“But how do we decide who plays on what Thursday?”
STEP 3: Thursday games ALWAYS follow bye weeks
This step is the ‘holy grail’ if the goal is eliminating the most legitimate concerns about Thursday Night Football; the lack of preparation time and the injury risk to players.
Each team having two byes makes this far more workable for the schedule makers. Each team would have one “full bye,” with a full off-week (13-14 days) between games, and one “partial bye,” after which they would play a Thursday game after having the previous weekend off (9-10 days between games), and then not play again until the following weekend (another 10-11 days between games).
For example, a team that is scheduled to play the week 6 Thursday Night Football game would have a week 5 ‘partial bye.’ Then, to ensure as equal amount of time as possible between byes, that team would also have a week 12 ‘full bye.’ A team scheduled to play the week 14 Thursday night game would have a week 13 ‘partial bye,’ and a week 6 ‘full bye.’
It is rare to find an agreeable scenario in which ‘everybody wins,’ but this three-step solution does just that. Owners win, because they keep their 20-game gate, and I would argue trade a throw-away preseason game for a regular season game that will be fully attended. Players win, because the unreasonably fast turn-around demanded by the current Thursday structure would be eliminated, and they earn an extra regular-season paycheck. Consumers win, because the quality of the Thursday night product would be increased dramatically by eliminating the time-crunch factors that make it less than what it ultimately can be, and we get another week of NFL football that matters.
I really feel like this solves the problem, and provides a positive outcome for all parties involved. Please let me know what you think. Let’s work together to make Thursday Night Football all it can be!
J.D Day