One of the big complaints about NFL Thursday night football is that the players only get four days to recover from the previous game. Everyone says it’s not enough and it probably contributes to injuries. There’s a simple solution but I don’t know if anyone has even thought of it, much less proposed it.
Every team gets a bye week sometime in the season. If they scheduled the bye weeks so that any team playing on a Thursday gets the week before off, it would eliminate the four day week. Those teams would instead get two longish breaks in a row, one of 11 days and one of 10.
I can’t think of any downside to this idea. But it hasn’t been implemented, so perhaps no one’s proposed it before. Is there any way to get it to the NFL PTB?
Yep, it’s been proposed a few times that I’ve seen. They mentioned it on Pardon the Interruption this week after Richard Sherman got hurt on Thursday. It seems like a reasonable idea. One problem is that they want to have Thursday games every week, but there are only byes in the middle part of the season.
Another thing is that I’m not sure whether it’s been shown that Thursday games actually cause more injuries. The players and the public seem to think they do, so maybe that’s enough anyway to force a change.
it’s because major sports are now really TV shows where TV controls when and where they play.
In major college FB most of the game times are not set until either 10 or 6 days before kickoff which is not fun for people coming from out of town since they may need to get a hotel room.
The biggest drawback is no one wants an early season bye week. Also, those stupid London games usually give the teams that played a bye the following week. And, of course, there are 3 Thursday games on Thanksgiving.
Good. I was afraid I was the only one this idea had occured to, and that would be scary.
Well, maybe they can only do it after the bye weeks start. It’d be better than not doing it at all.
You’d think this would be something the folks at 538 would tackle. That kind of number crunching is right up their alley.
Another reason to get rid of them. Or they can be worked in together:
Week N: Team A vs Team B in London
Week N+1: Teams A, B, C, and D have byes
Week N+2: Thursday double header A vs C & B vs D
OK, they don’t have Thursday doubleheaders yet. They could try it and see how it works.
Any reason 6 teams can’t have their bye weeks on the same weekend? Or even work this into the London games. London game two weeks before T-day, 6 teams get byes the next week, then 3 Thanksgiving games among them.
Even if it can’t be proven that the short week leads to more injuries, it’s pretty widely know that the teams themselves abhor playing on Thursdays (or on any day other than Sunday, really).
An NFL team has a very formal, very scripted preparation schedule for each game – this includes treating player injuries, yes, but also studying the previous game’s tape, studying the next opponent, installing a game plan, and practices. Playing on Thursday night forces a major disruption in that scripted schedule, and shortchanges development and installation of the game plan, and player practice.
Many believe that this is a factor in why so many Thursday night games turn out to be bad games – particularly if the game matches up a more experienced team and coaching staff versus a younger team, the short week may be magnifying the differences between the teams.
The NFL isn’t going to give up Thursday games. It puts them in the sports cycle for another day out of the week (three), and allows them to dominate football news. There’s simply too much money there to just give away, so unless things change drastically, TNF is here to stay.
So extend the season a week, and start bye weeks on Week 1. Second bye is 8 weeks after the first, breaking everyone’s season into two parts-ish. The most weeks played in a row is 8, and a Thursday night game will always have teams working off ten days of rest, with another nine days after it. 32 teams, 16 TNF games, everybody gets a “two games in three weeks” portion, and we avoid the pitfalls of the Week 4 bye (13 games straight to finish the regular season, then up to another 4 in a row for the playoffs). To accommodate the extra week of regular season play, move the Pro Bowl to after the Super Bowl. Better yet, get rid of the Pro Bowl and turn it into a skills competition, a la baseball and basketball. I’m sure the theory could be improved, but it’s a start. Throw in full-time status for all the referees, give them gym memberships, and pay bonuses when they’re all stack like Ed Hochuli. No particular reason for the last, except it’s always funny to see the most well-built guy on the field dressed as a zebra.
While I’m at it, I’m willing to do Goodell’s job for a tenth of what he’s asking ($50 million a year), provided I have a contract guaranteed for at least one year, and I get to laugh in Jerruh’s face and kick the Bears out of the league. Hell, I’d be willing to negotiate on the last part - maybe just suspend them for a year, or let the spaceship take off out of Soldier Field. C’mon, Arthur Blank, you know you want to…
I don’t disagree with you, though I think that one of the reasons for NFL TV ratings softening – and overall interest in watching games starting to dip, especially among younger fans – is overexposure of the league, and TNF is a prime suspect in that overexposure. The fact that those games are often bad doesn’t help.
So, if the league can’t be convinced to kill TNF, I totally agree that much more needs to be done to address the impact of that short week on the players and teams.
The NFL likes to wrap up the bye weeks by the middle of November. The weather turns colder in many parts of the United States, the World Series is over,elections are over and people start taking time off from work towards the end of the year. The NFL wants all their teams playing during that time.
I agree it is bad for the players. The owners don’t care. If it were up to them there would be games (and TV revenue) every night of the week. It’s similar to the argument for adding weeks to the season.
If I had it my way, there would be at most four Thursday games a year. Season opener and either two or three games on Thanksgiving. Probably three, so a couple more teams that aren’t Dallas or Detroit get to play.