Fixing ‘Thursday Night Football’ Isn’t Worth the Cost of Flex Scheduling

The NFL and Amazon badly want to improve their mediocre midweek product, even at the risk of competitive fairness and player safety.

Thanks to the benevolence of NFL owners, who voted Monday to approve Thursday night flex scheduling, our overlords at Amazon have to give teams 28 days notice before they jam them into a short-rest football game. Imagine all the things we could do, if we were to find out four weeks in advance about the multiple, recovery-free car crashes our bodies would get into.

It’s almost like they wouldn’t happen! Hopefully Advil is available on Prime subscription.

To say that this development was unsurprising would be an understatement. The writing, for the NFL at least, was on the wall the moment they released their 2023 schedule. More determined than ever to Kardashian-ize their slate of games, nothing about the schedule represented competitive fairness. It was all about giving rich people what they claim they paid for. It was all about perpetuating the reality show.

I understand there’s a lot of tiny print in here that makes the whole decision seem a little less bad (though, with eight teams voting against the measure, this is about as close as you can get to a situation where you could sense the discomfort from ownership). No team can play Thursday night twice. It has to happen between Weeks 13 and 17. It can only happen twice. There is a short list of coaches and players who will find themselves absolutely hosed based on the criteria, a lot like the poor unfortunate souls who are forced to do Hard Knocks.

Tua Tagovailoa’s frightening head injury was just one of the countless injuries that have occurred while players take the field on short rest for Thursday night games :: Kareem Elgazzar/USA TODAY Sports

The problem is that it’s yet another signal that the league has completely buried its past. There used to be meetings that focused on what was best for football. Now, it’s about how the NFL can completely and totally bury itself into your subconscious, health and safety be damned. Remember all the times we’ve spent during these primetime games praying that the ambulance would get onto the field fast enough to save someone’s limb movement ability. Ask yourself if what we really need is less time for these folks to heal. Ask yourself if we want to put another Tua Tagovailoa situation on the table just because we can’t wait three more days for a better football game.

I’ve said my peace about the 2023 schedule already, but I do think it’s noteworthy that the Giants were among the teams who voted against the proposal. In 2023, they play three times in 11 days and have the most short-rest games in the NFL. Four times—four!—they will be stepping onto the field with inadequate recovery time. Owner John Mara told reporters he was disappointed but not surprised. He’s spent enough time in that room to know that a soul and conscience are harder to come by than desert rain. His team was buried before the season was even started; a Godfather style drive-by from a man in a Peacock hat.

So few of us asked for Thursday Night Football to exist in the first place. When the NFL started schlepping it on our plate a few years back, the equivalent of Hungryman leftovers, we made fun of it. It was an acceptably bad product. If you are still watching deep into a 9–6 Cardinals-Steelers tilt with a handful of MAC legend quarterbacks trying to shove the football down the field, that’s an issue between you and your bookie. I never blamed Al Michaels for nodding off.

Now, there is a fist-on-table demand for it to feel special, just like all the other premium products on the schedule. The only problem is that we’ve passed the tipping point. There is no safer way to deliver more great football.

In some ways, it’s a bit comforting that the NFL told its workforce the same thing every corporation in America said to theirs following the pandemic: work more, work better, the end. Figure out the rest.

Here’s hoping more players take the hint and walk away before the game exacts its toll on them. Maybe then, with no premium product left to sell, we can start backing away from forcing it on Thursday night. Before long, Monday Morning Football will be up for a vote. Twelve hours of rest is enough, right?