Solving Thursday Night Football Problems

I occasionally ready Peter King's Monday Morning Quarterback column. Last week, one of his readers e-mailed him a suggestion when King wrote about the problems with Thursday Night Football. The problem is that teams have to cram a week's worth of preparation into three days. This gets further exacerbated when you have late games and travel. For example, the New York Jets played the Sunday night game this past weekend. It was after midnight when the players got home. Then they had to cram a week's preparation into three days, then hop on a plane and fly out to Denver to play tonight. That doesn't seem like a fair situation.

The solution that this reader e-mailed Peter King was a setup where all 32 teams in the NFL played one Thursday game and that to prepare, they not play the Sunday before. This would have two additional advantages in that it would get rid of bye weeks as we have them now and it would guarantee every team at least one prime time game. I would think the NFL network would like it in that it would mean extending Thursday night games to nearly the entire season.

My own spin on it would work like this. There are 32 teams in the NFL. To give each one a unique match up on Thursday would mean 16 games. However, Detroit and Dallas already play on Thanksgiving, in addition to the normally scheduled Thursday night game (this year it's SF vs. Baltimore). This now gives you 13 games to fit into 16 weeks. My thought is to have all 32 teams play for the first three weeks, give four teams week 4 off and then open Thursday Night Football with a double header much like Monday Night Football does now. The remaining 15 weeks would then be filled in with a single game and the two teams taking part in that game taking the week before off.

An example using match ups from this season (and including all scheduled Thursday Night games) might look as follows:

Week 5 - Minnesota at Carolina, Arizona at St. Louis
Week 6 - New Orleans at Tampa Bay
Week 7 - Kansas City at Chicago
Week 8 - Washington at NY Giants
Week 9 - Cincinnati at Tennessee
Week 10 - Oakland at San Diego
Week 11 - NY Jets at Denver
Week 12 - Green Bay at Detroit, Miami at Dallas, San Francisco at Baltimore
Week 13 - Philadelphia at Seattle
Week 14 - Cleveland at Pittsburgh
Week 15 - Jacksonville at Atlanta
Week 16 - Houston at Indianapolis
Week 17 - Buffalo at New England

This will probably never happen, but it fun to think about.