NFL re-considering Thursday Night Football (1 Viewer)

[superchuck500]

Per Florio- poor ratings and overall negative attitude among teams, players, fans about TNF is prompting league review with possibly ending the 'experiment'.

With mounting criticism of the quality of every-week Thursday football, scattered suggestions have emerged in recent weeks that the NFL could pull the plug on the experiment. Those suggestions are stronger than that; per a source with knowledge of the situation, the league will be considering the possibility of ending, or at least limiting, Thursday Night Football.

The current contract with CBS and NBC runs through 2017, which means that changes to the package could be made by 2018 — barring a renegotiation.

The league realizes that, with every team playing once on a short week each season, many of the Thursday games necessarily will have reduced appeal. Adding extra prime-time games to the Sunday/Monday inventory also has created a sense that the league has saturated the marketplace with stand-alone evening games.

Options include (but aren’t limited to) getting rid of Thursday games completely and possibly starting the package at Thanksgiving and continuing it through the end of the season, with games likely to generate broad interest selected in April for November/December programming. Thursday Night Football debuted a decade ago as a device for providing game content for NFL Network, allowing the league-owned operation to generate higher fees from cable and satellite providers.

League will take a close look at Thursday Night Football | ProFootballTalk

 

[bigdub81]

They'll start making teams play double headers on Sunday's now ��

 

[SaintJ]

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.

 

[RaisingTheBar]

It's stupid, get rid of the TNF games.

 

[St. Geezy]

Good!

I don't think they need to completely abolish it. Just make it to where it is pretty much mandatory that all teams playing on Thursdays are teams coming off bye weeks.

And since bye weeks don't start until a few weeks into the season and end a few weeks before the end of the year, this will allow them to cut out the "clearly going to be bad games" from the Thursday lineup - I.E. Jags-Titans, Browns-Ravens, etc.

I'd even take it a step further, especially if the above is not an option - Stop making these divisional games. Those games are too important to be played on short weeks. Make them mostly intra-conference matchups.

No team should be playing on 4 days rest and preparation, ever, and if they must, they shouldn't be the most important games on the schedule.

 

[Saint Kamara]

Player safety Roger.

Remember?

 

[SaintKenn]

That would be the best, play them coming off a bye week. Even if they do abolish it completely, I'd still like the color rush games to be a thing. Interested to see what our home uniforms are gonna look like. Hopefully it won't be those God awful gold jerseys that we wore against Minnesota.

 

[Paul]

I'm ok with them getting rid of them altogether, minus Thanksgiving, but I'm probably in the minority.

 

[St. Anger]

I'm ok with them getting rid of them altogether, minus Thanksgiving, but I'm probably in the minority.

Agreed. Thursday/Thanksgiving games had that "special" feel to them because it's Thanksgiving.

Get rid of the Thursday night games but like you said, keep Thanksgiving. And get rid of those God-awful color rush uniforms.

 

[SAINTIN NEBR]

Anyone else notice that Dallas gets to play their Thursday Night game on 7 days rest? Just sayin.... how fair is that?

 

[diehardfan]

TNF stinks

 

[Saint_Ward]

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.

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.

 

[Meachemdat]

Thursday night games are responsible for the following:

1. Injuring players
2. Creating terrible games in which the better team usually travels and loses.

 

[Nightshade]

Does anyone watch Thursday night football other when their team is playing? I know I don't.

 

[superchuck500]

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.

I'd like to see them just keep opening week and Thanksgiving and scrap the rest. I don't think teams minded playing on Thanksgiving - it was a special thing. But the rest of it is really a problem. I don't like the idea of keeping a "late season" schedule of TNF like they used to do . . . byes are over at that point and teams that are fighting for important playoff positions that happen to have one of those TNF games is prejudiced by it. That sucks.

I think the opening week 1 TNF is fine, and Thanksgiving is a tradition they don't need to mess with. The rest of it is unnecessary. It was purely a money grab anyway, and it is hurting the overall brand.