Packer Central

Rodgers, Henry Among Kings of Thursday Night Football

Aaron Rodgers and Derrick Henry will take center stage when the Green Bay Packers host the Tennessee Titans. They have been great on Thursday nights.

Bill Huber

Rodgers, Henry Among Kings of Thursday Night Football
Rodgers, Henry Among Kings of Thursday Night Football /
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GREEN BAY, Wis. – Aaron Rodgers has been good every day of the week and every time of day. Thursday nights have been no exception.

Since taking over as the Green Bay Packers’ starting quarterback in 2008, Rodgers has led the team to an 11-5 record on Thursday nights. No team has won more games.

Over that span, he’s No. 1 with 34 touchdown passes and No. 2 with 3,957 yards. With 34 touchdowns vs. five interceptions, Rodgers is plus-29. Tom Brady (plus-24) and Peyton Manning (plus-21) are the only other quarterbacks who are plus-20.

“I feel like we’ve done pretty good on these Thursday games over the years,” Rodgers said on Tuesday. “We’ve had probably more than half of them at home, which helps. It’s obviously a big advantage for us to sleep in our own beds and have our crowd. But I think it just comes down to the study time (and) just being locked in. These are long days. We’re going through a lot of different plays. We’re cramming it in two days into one day. It’s a lot of work for the coaches and a lot of study for the players.”

Rodgers has mostly aced those exams. Among the 62 quarterbacks with at least 80 attempts since 2008, Rodgers is seventh in passer rating (106.6) and completion percentage (67.2), ninth in touchdown percentage (6.4) and 10th in interception percentage (0.9).

Under coach Matt LaFleur, the Packers are 3-1 on Thursday nights. In 2019, they edged the Bears 10-3 in the NFL’s season-opening game in Chicago. A few weeks later, they lost at home to the Eagles 34-27. Green Bay routed the shorthanded 49ers 34-17 in San Francisco in 2020. Last year, the shorthanded Packers – playing without Davante Adams, Allen Lazard and Marquez Valdes-Scantling – hit the road and knocked off the undefeated Cardinals 24-21 on Rasul Douglas’ game-saving interception.

Under coach Mike Vrabel, the Titans are 2-2 on Thursday nights. They lost their only road game 20-7 at Jacksonville in 2019. Tennessee’s offense features powerhouse running back Derrick Henry, who you’d think might be more difficult to tackle on a short week. In his five games, he’s rushed for 477 yards (95.4 per game) and averaged 6.28 yards per carry. Those are considerably better than his numbers on Sunday (81.7 per game, 4.77 per carry) and Monday (78.7 per game, 4.87 per carry).

Among all running backs in the Super Bowl era with at least 50 carries on Thursday nights, only O.J. Simpson (6.9) has a better average than Henry.

For the banged-up Titans, it’s a case of ready-or-not, they’ve got to play like it’s a typical week.

“We have to tell ourselves that, we have to tell our bodies that, we have to tell our minds that," Vrabel said Monday. “But we also have to try to do the best that we can to win the mental performance and the physical recovery battle here the next couple of days. Everybody deals with it.”

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Bill Huber
BILL HUBER

Bill Huber, who has covered the Green Bay Packers since 2008, is the publisher of Packers On SI, a Sports Illustrated channel. E-mail: packwriter2002@yahoo.com History: Huber took over Packer Central in August 2019. Twitter: https://twitter.com/BillHuberNFL Background: Huber graduated from the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater, where he played on the football team, in 1995. He worked in newspapers in Reedsburg, Wisconsin Dells and Shawano before working at The Green Bay News-Chronicle and Green Bay Press-Gazette from 1998 through 2008. With The News-Chronicle, he won several awards for his commentaries and page design. In 2008, he took over as editor of Packer Report Magazine, which was founded by Hall of Fame linebacker Ray Nitschke, and PackerReport.com. In 2019, he took over the new Sports Illustrated site Packer Central, which he has grown into one of the largest sites in the Sports Illustrated Media Group.

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