NFL re-considering Thursday Night Football

SaintJ said

All they have to do is give the two teams playing on Thursday night a bye on Sunday, so they have 11 days before that game, and 10 until the next one. Instead of a bye, you still play only one game in 20 days. Players can still get a good five-day break after the Sunday game, and come back on Saturday to prep for Thursday, and then a nice long weekend after that before the next game.

I'm not the first to mention this idea, and I am baffled why they don't just do it that way.

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I think the complication is that with 17 weeks to pull this off, you'd be stuck in two scenarios.

1. You get a week 1, 2, 3 or 15, 16, 17 bye weeks, which sucks.

2. You'd have multiple Thursday night games at once, to accommodate the teams. You have 32 teams, so 16 potential Thursday night games (if you had everyone do it).

So, that's 16 bye weeks. Or 8 bye weeks with 2 Thursday games at the same time, but that diminishes the idea of a "prime time" game with national coverage.

Perhaps the best solution would be to minimize the teams that have a Thursday game, to like half the league, so you only have 8 games to worry about, and you can work the bye weeks for those 8 teams.