NFL Considering Adding Another Thursday Night Game
By Peter Smith
The NFL and commissioner Roger Goodell are considering adding a second game to Thursdays. Evidently, one overwhelmingly mediocre example of their product a week is not enough. Goodell is always looking for a way to squeeze every last dime out of the sport and they know that people have an unending appetite for football and will watch and it will get huge ratings. The Pro Bowl gets over 10 million people watching, so fans will watch most anything. The move, should they go through with it, makes a ton of sense for the bottom line of the NFL, but the question that always comes up with Goodell is how the NFL is working to preserve the quality of the sport.
Thursday night games are an easy way to give teams that might not get a ton of exposure in primetime an outlet to show them off, which is great in theory. Teams like the Browns, Cardinals and Bills can get a national audience and some of the great players they have get increased exposure. The problem is that Thursday games are consistently a bad display of the sport that those teams that get that extra exposure look worse than they actually are, so it tends to backfire and viewers come out with misconceptions.
If the NFL wants to get additional exposure for teams, there are better ways to do it, such as adding a primetime kickoff for the west coast. The baseball playoffs forced this to happen earlier this year with the Oakland Raiders and San Diego Chargers playing at 7:30pm Pacific Time. The NFL could put in some more of these types of games or do another Monday night game. Everything about playing on Thursday makes sense on paper, but it just does not look good on the field and puts the NFL in a bad light, so doubling up on that does not make the NFL look good; just greedy. Fans get to see more of the NFL, but that does not mean it is always better. Money is great and the NFL is always going to work to get as much as possible, but they really need to push back and work to preserve the quality of the product.