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Leigh Steinberg Blog: Thursday Night Football — Enough Already!

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Scheduling and playing NFL games on Thursday night is unhealthy for players. Anyone who watches the slow recovery of a player’s body after a Sunday pounding knows that three days of recovery is insufficient.

Fans think of these players as gallant warriors, but they are also human beings with human limitations. It is hard to quantify the immediate impact with injury rates, but putting stress on stressed out bodies will take a toll somewhere down the line.

It helps to remember what the actual on-field experience is for players. As spectators and viewers, we are screened off from the actual force of the game. We see the action without really experiencing the repetitive train wrecks that break down the body on every play. Nutritional and training advances have created bigger, stronger and faster Robo-players. These bodies collide over and over again. Each collision is like running into a brick wall, continually shocking the body. The G-Force at the line of scrimmage has risen dramatically.

Players have always told me that trying to get out of bed on Monday morning is an incredibly painful experience. Monday tends to be a very light day for most NFL franchises. Tuesday is the player’s day off. Wednesday most players are still aching. To push a player out of the routine and structure that enables them to play a long season, by inserting a series of games that doesn’t allow the body to recover from the prior Sunday is dangerous.

Players I’ve talked to universally dread the Thursday game. Realistically, the league will continue to play these games. When the top seven Nielsen rated shows on television several weeks ago were all nighttime NFL Football games, it illustrated the insatiable appetite of fans. Last year the NFL Network aired games on Thursday and the ratings for the CBS games have doubled the previous year (7.3 million viewers to 16.7 million viewers). The league made $275 million from CBS and has an option for next year.

League statistics don’t show a dramatic spike in injuries during Thursday Night games compared to Sunday games. The season is at the mid-point and it will be interesting to see what happens in games to come when players have accumulated more wear and tear.

One thing is certain–NFL players have always exhibited more pain tolerance and quicker recovery ability than typical males. But somewhere down the road, the shock of playing Thursday will manifest. The body can only take so much shock.

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