‘Thursday Night Football’ ‘should be illegal’ to protect the NFL from itself

Just how unusual has the 2017 NFL season been? Weird enough that a lot of the Thursday Night Football games have actually been pretty enjoyable affairs compared to the tedious “poopfests” we’re used to.

But everything regresses to the mean. Thursday night NFL games are no different. Seattle’s 22-16 win over Arizona brought us back to the harsh reality of mid-week games.

After watching that game and seeing even more of the league’s best players, notably Richard Sherman, hauled off the field hurt, you can’t argue with Seahawks receiver Doug Baldwin’s assessment — “Thursday Night Football should be illegal.”

“This shit should be illegal. It is not OK. It’s not OK. You can quote me on that,” Baldwin continued.

The Seahawks lost six starters. They have every right to be upset with the fact that the league, to pull off Thursday night games, often forces a team to turn around and play with just three days off since their last game, the Sunday before.

Seahawks linebacker Bobby Wagner said that if the league was going to make teams play on Thursdays, the least they could do was schedule it so that the teams were coming off a bye the week before.

Seattle head coach Pete Carroll wouldn’t say a word about Thursday games because he didn’t want to get fined.

Thursday night games are bad for players. This week’s game was a wake-up call — a brutal reminder that hit you like Kam Chancellor flying into a tight end at midfield. Except Chancellor got hurt this week too.

For all the league’s talk about prioritizing player safety, the continued existence of Thursday Night Football makes it clear that the NFL only cares about it up to a point but not enough to sacrifice a billion dollar cash cow.

That’s changing too. Thursday nights might not always be the cash machine the NFL has gotten used to.

In the last three weeks, two network executives have pointed to the oversaturation of NFL games on television, specifically singling out Thursday nights.

“There’s a question mark for the NFL, which is just to think hard about how they’re licensing. So I do think the proliferation of Thursday availability — and the proliferation of football generally — does mean that you’re asking a lot from customers to watch Thursday,” FOX CEO James Murdoch said in October when asked about slipping ratings for pro football.

“I do think it’s clear that adding 10 games to the Thursday night package and two additional Sunday morning London games has clearly diluted the Sunday afternoon packages and affected the ratings. It’s just simple mathematics,” CBS Sports chairman Sean McManus said earlier this month.

Those are two execs from networks that spend more than a billion dollars every year to broadcast NFL games. It’s safe to say that will come up again next time they sit down to renegotiate those broadcast deals.

Oh, and there’s the fact that fans don’t really like Thursday games. Sure, we end up watching them, fewer and fewer of us every season, but the NFL’s never been especially responsive to the demands of its fans.

It’s time to pull the plug on Thursday Night Football. The networks should press for that when they have the chance, but there’s always another entity willing to swoop in and grab it. Our best hope to end it lies with the players in the next round of collective bargaining talks. It still puts in the players in a tough spot. Owners might be willing to concede their Thursday night ATM instead of, say, sharing more of the overall revenue with players.

But the bottom line is that in order to extract those kind of concessions from NFL owners, players are going to have to be willing to miss games.

I’m not holding out much hope that the NFL will see the self-preservation value of nixing Thursday games, though it probably should. Laws and rules and regulations of all sorts are there to protect people from themselves. To that end, Baldwin is right, Thursday Night Football really should be illegal.