An Obvious Solution

Thursday Night Football is only a few years old, yet it is already entrenched in the minds of NFL viewers. We all know what to expect from these games. Sloppy play, lots of penalties, and an increased rate of injury are almost synonymous with Thursday Night Football. They still draw fantastic ratings, but no one particularly looks forward to these games—not the fans, not the coaches, and definitely not the players.

The shortened week leads to the lowest quality of football and can have far reaching consequences to those who attempt to play without allowing their bodies to properly recuperate from the previous Sunday’s game. A couple times last year there were even teams who couldn’t find 46 healthy players to have active for the game, and with a short week there is no way they could bring someone in off the street and hope to have them contribute even on special teams. Thursday Night Football is usually ugly, rarely competitive, and on the whole barely worth watching.

But as bad as it is, it’s here to stay. There is too much money involved, and as we have seen repeatedly over the past few years, the league office will do whatever it wants if there is significant money at stake. Earlier this year a bidding war broke out for the rights to broadcast Thursday Night Football, eventually going to CBS for $275 million for a single year. For comparison, the average NFL game brings in about $6 million in ticket sales. Selling the broadcast rights to thirteen games produced as much revenue for the NFL as the ticket sales for three weeks of action. We’re talking about the rights for the NFL’s lowest rated primetime games, a value that will only increase during the next round of bidding next year. The NFL is not getting rid of Thursday Night Football, no matter how many people complain.

As people have realized this over the past couple years, they’ve begun to try to figure out solutions to this problem. We need to find a way to make the games better while satisfying the fans, the coaches, the players, and—most importantly—the league offices. Many propositions suggest playing each game after both teams have had their bye week, but there are several reasons this wouldn’t work. First of all, the bye weeks only occur from Week 4 through Week 11, and the Thursday Night Games run through the entire season. It might be possible to convince the NFL to cut a couple of the games, but they seem to like the idea of every team playing at least once on a Thursday. We still need sixteen games, and it wouldn’t be possible to coordinate the byes. The players wouldn't be happy about this change either. Every team gives their players a week off from practice when they’re on the bye, giving them time to spend with their families or travel. Placing a Thursday game immediately after the bye would force the teams to cut into their bye weeks for practice, essentially splitting the players’ short time off into two smaller chunks.

There is a solution to this, and it’s one so obvious that it should have already happened. Players don’t want to sacrifice their bye weeks, but these games can still be coordinated with a bye week if we give every team an additional bye during the season. Expand the season to 18 weeks, give every team two bye weeks, and schedule all the Thursday games for the week following one of the team’s byes. Under this schedule we would need bye weeks to run from Week 2 through Week 15, but in the extreme weeks we could restrict it to only the teams playing in the following Thursday’s game, to prevent fans from having to go two full weeks without seeing their team early or late in the season. These teams would still have a normal bye week during the middle of the year, and they wouldn’t have to worry about playing a long stretch of uninterrupted games. All 32 teams would be able to play on a Thursday (including the two additional Thanksgiving games) and none would have to do so on a shortened week.

The reason the fans will like this is fairly simple: the football will not be nearly as terrible. Rather than watching players coming off four days rest, they will be watching players who haven’t played a game in a full eleven days. Their bodies will be as recovered as possible from the pounding of their last game, and they will have had plenty of time to study the tape of their opposition and practice their team’s game plan. We will see a much higher quality product, better even than a normal Sunday game. This should lead to more competitive games and fewer sloppy mistakes.

Coaches will love the extra time just as much as the fans. Four days isn’t nearly enough time to study tape, prepare a game plan, and implement it among the players. Most coaching staffs have to begin preparations even before their previous game is played, dividing their resources and hurting themselves for Sunday’s matchup. An extra week will eliminate these concerns, giving them the maximum time possible to prepare their team for the competition. Coaches love bye weeks, and adding another one to the schedule will only make their jobs easier.

No one has reason to love this more than the players. It is borderline criminal to ask people to play two football games within a span of four days. The human body simply isn’t capable of handling that sort of punishment, and you see that in the abnormally high rate of injuries that take place in Thursday games. The NFLPA has spent the past few years fighting to improve the conditions of their players, trying to prevent injuries that can derail careers and harm long term futures. Fixing Thursday Night Football has long been one of their top priorities, and under this plan they would be able to do so without having to sacrifice their bye week.

So that leaves only one faction to worry ourselves with: the faction with all the power. The NFL is a league run by the owners, and they have shown repeatedly that they don’t give a damn what the fans, the coaches, or the players want. If something doesn’t help make them money, they have very little interest in it. Fortunately, this plan will bring plenty of extra money to the owners’ pockets.

The number one issue on the owners’ minds over the past few years has been the possibility of expanding the season to 18 games. The reasons for this are obvious—more games means more tickets and more television viewership, leading to more money—but to this point they have been shut down by a lack of public support and fierce resistance from the players, who don’t want to risk additional games on an already brutal schedule. With the recent lawsuits and negative publicity around the concussion issue, it seems unlikely that the schedule will expand anytime soon. The owners are stuck with a 16 game season.

Adding an additional bye would have some of the effect of adding an additional two games on the schedule. The number of games would still be the same so there would be no increase in ticket sales, but an extra week of games means an extra week of television. There are some viewers who will still only watch the games played by their favorite teams, but there are plenty of fans who will tune in every week no matter who is playing. The networks would definitely be willing to renegotiate their contracts to account for this additional week, bringing in more revenue for the league and the owners.

It is rare to find a solution to a problem that satisfies everyone involved, but in this case it’s hard to find a problem with this plan. There may be a few small kinks to work out, but this is the sort of thing that should already have happened. We’ve suffered through enough miserable Thursday night games over the past few years. It’s time to make a real effort towards improving the competition of these games.