The Thursday Night Football experiment has done more harm than good for the NFL. Those games need to go away for good.
It’s time I come clean and admit I goofed in a big way several years ago. I was excited about Thursday Night Football games not all that long ago. After all, I’m a huge National Football League fan. I DVR weekly editions of NFL RedZone to review certain situations and games. I could watch football every day of the week.
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I clearly underestimated how consistently awful the Thursday Night Football games would be.
It’s no secret NFL players hate the Thursday Night Football contests. Unless the teams are coming off a bye week, players have little rest between a Sunday game and preparing to play again on Thursday. The athletes are mentally and physically fatigued even before taking the field in front of a national television audience. Of course the Thursday Night Football games are routinely lousy.
Lackluster television ratings for primetime football games continue to make headlines through the middle of October. Yahoo’s Daniel Roberts recently wrote about the matter. There are likely several factors contributing to why fewer people are tuning into nighttime NFL games this season. Thursday Night Football may or may not be a culprit, but those games certainly aren’t helping.
Not every Thursday Night Football game is terrible, of course. But it’s not an understatement to say there’s been more bad contests than good match-ups over the past several years. We’ve come to the point where fans, analysts, and commentators alike essentially expect to see terrible football action on Thursdays:
It's amazing just how bad these Thursday games are every week. Doesn't matter the team or matchup. Teams just aren't physically ready to go.
— The Coach (@Thecoachrules) October 14, 2016
It’s worth mentioning, before I go any further, that Thursday Night Football as it exists today probably isn’t going anywhere anytime soon. As the NFL reported last February via the official league website, theThursday Night Football package was expanded through the 2017 campaign. CBS, NBC, and NFL Network will broadcast different games through the end of next season.
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What’s done is done. The NFL, for all its power, cannot travel back in time and cancel that deal, nor can the parties involved burn that existing contract and act as if it never existed. You’re getting Thursday Night Football for the next 14 months, whether you like it or not.
That’s fine, NFL, so long as you promise that you’ve learned from your miscues and will stop giving us these terrible football games come 2018.
Quality of play alone is not the only reason we want Thursday Night Football to forever vanish. As well-known New York sports radio personality Mike Francesa once explained, there is now far too much football on our airwaves during the fall.
We get seven hours of football each Sunday afternoon followed by a Sunday Night Football game. There is then Monday Night Football and Thursday Night Football. Those evening contests sometimes compete with postseason MLB games during October weeknights.
It’s too much.
There’s even more football on once the World Series comes to an end. Those with access to cable television stations can find either college or NFL football on TV just about every night for a few weeks each November. Those of us who are football diehards cannot get enough of the sport, but the ratings seem to indicate casual fans can only take so much.
Would-be football viewers are able to entertain themselves away from the game via avenues that weren’t as popular or didn’t exist when the idea of Thursday Night Football first entered the minds of NFL and television executives. Per Aaron Pressman of Fortune, over 1 million Americans ditched television service providers to “cut the cord” and embrace streaming services such as Netflix, Amazon Prime, Hulu, and Sling.
Why would a casual fan put up with a poor Thursday Night Football game when he can watch a variety of other programs whenever he wants via streaming or On Demand?
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The NFL will likely remain the king of Sunday afternoons for years to come. Multiple games airing at the same time allows viewers to pick what airs and when on their TVs, and RedZone continues to be the coolest thing to hit sports airing on TV since instant replay. Evening games are no longer a luxury as they were when the first Monday Night Football game aired. It’s a different era from decades ago. And the NFL and television networks need to understand that and make Thursday Night Football a thing of the past.
Not every swing for the fences results in a home run. The NFL tried to make Thursday Night Football a thing—and it didn’t work. Let’s all move on.