“You've got to be a part of it. You've got to be on the sidelines with them [the players] to understand. Whatever it takes to keep them in the game, to keep the whole thing going…It's business” (Concussion). Imagine for a moment that in a future job your boss asks you for weekly report on the performance of the company for that week. It is hard work and you put a lot of hours into it.  The report takes all week to do and by Friday you are exhausted but also extraordinarily proud of your work. It is now the weekend and while you love your job, a break is needed. Now imagine one week, your boss asks for the report on Wednesday. Panic sinks in as you think of everything you have to do in such a short time, you have to give up your days off to work and because of the shortened timeline, the report you turn in is sloppy. By the end of it all you are exhausted and later find out that this midweek report only benefitted your boss. Would you feel cheated? Would you feel overworked? Would you even feel that, because of all the work and stress, your health is at risk? This is exactly what is happening in the National Football League with the creation and continuation of Thursday Night Football. Ever since the National Football League and American Football League merger in 1966 to form the NFL, games have been played on Sunday and Monday. Then, in 2006, the NFL created Thursday Night Football which immediately became a topic of debate between the businessmen who run the NFL and those who are responsible for making the NFL billions of dollars: the players and coaches. The midweek game makes coaches feel rushed to prepare a game plan and players feel rushed to get physically ready to prepare for yet another bruising game. Meanwhile, the NFL claims to be advocates for player safety while simultaneously running a midweek game that obviously puts more strain on players’ bodies. Although the NFL is foremost a business that occasionally solves player safety concerns, they prove to be hypocrites on the topic of player safety because of the way Thursday Night Football threatens the safety, quality, and morality of football. 

Thursday Night Football has now been being played for just over a decade yet has proven to be a disaster. The original thought of a midweek game to quench fans’ thirst for football during a grueling work week seemed like a great idea, but Thursday Night Football is not satisfying due to the player’s poor play. The players are not to blame for the underwhelming play shown on Thursday night, it is the game’s itself. Football is an extremely entertaining but also brutal game that requires rest between games, and an ample amount of it. Richard Sherman, a star cornerback for the Seattle Seahawks, voiced his opinion on Thursday Night Football in his article on The Players’ Tribune, “Why I Hate Thursday Night Football.” Sherman walks readers through a typical work week in the NFL, and being a starting player, is a reliable source on the matter. He describes game days as what players live for but cause pain for several days after. Luckily there is a day off on Tuesday to recover and on Thursday, practice is do-able but players certainly aren’t game ready. Sherman then describes a week in which a player was to play a Thursday night game: a typical Sunday game, but now the Tuesday day off is taken away for practice and when Thursday rolls around players just aren’t physically ready. This causes a lower quality of football Sherman points out by saying: “That’s why the quality of play has been so poor on Thursday nights this season. We’ve seen blowouts, sloppy play and games that have been almost unwatchable — and it’s not the players’ faults. Their bodies just aren’t ready to play.” Forcing players to sacrifice a much needed and deserved day off to play a game three days earlier is ignorant, unentertaining, and dangerous. Players’ bodies just aren’t ready to be pushed and hit like they are with a full week between games. Nothing positive comes from forcing players to play on Thursday night. Players are still sore from the game before and as Mark Garafolo of USA Today shows, their skills aren’t tuned either. When studying Thursday Night Football, Garafolo found that visiting teams have a winning percentage of .38 compared to the .432 winning percentage on all other days. Furthermore, in the Journal of Statistics Education, Timothy Vaughan found that, in the 2012-2014 seasons, Thursday Night Football boasts a 14.69-point average margin of victory compared to 11.82 and 10.79 on Sunday and Monday respectively. This shows that Thursday night games are not only predictable, with the home team having a much higher chance of winning, but also the games are blowouts. This produces are boring, dry product; and with only sixteen games in the season for each team, every game matters. With an increased chance of injury and mismatched games, it is hard to see why Thursday Night Football is still running and shows that the NFL does not take player safety seriously. 

Public outcry over injuries, particularly ones involving the head, have forced the NFL’s hand over the past few years to implement changes to make the game safer. One of these rule changes came before the 2011 season when the kickoff position was moved from the thirty to the thirty-five-yard line, hoping to cause more touchbacks and thus less chance for injury. Peter Ruestow of the Journal of Occupational and Environmental Hygiene studied the effects of this change to find that following the rule change, total kickoff injuries dropped from fifty-four in 2010 to just 25 in 2011. While this change did result in a lower amount of injuries, the NFL used this to give the public what they wanted: a safer football game, but did this without making drastic changes to the game that would result in much less injuries. In the Vanderbilt Journal Journal of Entertainment and Technology Law, author Jeremy Gove points out that the NFL’s own research committee declared that kickoff returners and kickoff units were at a low-risk of brain injury. Gove continues to question why the NFL would alter a rule that not only players and coaches preferred, but also was a low-risk situation. The answer is that the NFL wanted to produce the illusion that they were putting player safety first when in fact they were doing the bare minimum in order to maintain their current formula of success and profit. A formula that includes Thursday Night Football which is an embodiment of the NFL’s hypocrisy about player safety.  

The National Football League is a different breed of company. It has its grip on millions of Americans whether it be through merchandise, charities, or simply watching the games. The game of football has become a staple of American culture as people are transfixed by the power but also the beauty and finesse of the game. Because of this transfixion, the NFL is now controlling company with little to no checks or balances. With no checks or balances, the NFL has become money hungry and immoral. For decades, the NFL was a thriving and respected company that produced American idols (who were often the most violent of hitters) such as Lawrence Taylor, “Mean” Joe Greene, and Deacon Jones. This all changed in the early 21st century as some of the hard-hitting legends of the game began to take their own lives, passing far before their time. The film “Concussion”, directed by Peter Landesman, tells the true story of neuropathologist Dr. Bennett Omalu, portrayed by Will Smith, as he discovers a brain disease shared within the brains among several of retired NFL players that took their own lives which he coined Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy (CTE). Dr. Omalu quickly began to release this information expecting to be supported the NFL who he assumed would be concerned about the care of both former and current players. Omalu soon figured out that this was not the case. Instead, the NFL wanted Omalu to retract his findings. Once it was discovered that the NFL did not want this information in the public, Omalu’s colleagues urged him to quit his studies because they knew the power of the NFL. The NFL was seemingly and untouchable company, a Goliath, which Omalu’s boss and friend, Dr. Cyril Wecht, warned him about by saying “the NFL owns a day of the week, the same day the Church used to own” (Concussion). This showed the power and influence the NFL had, a power they were using for all the wrong reasons. The NFL was, and seemingly is still not fully concerned with the safety, health, or opinions of their players. In 2006, four years after the initial findings of Dr. Omalu, the NFL established Thursday Night Football which came under immediate scrutiny by players and coaches as shown in a New York Times interview of then Seattle Seahawks head coach Mike Holmgren conducted by writer Clifton Brown. Holmgren was not afraid to voice his opinion on both the game and the NFL itself by saying: “It’s like fighting City Hall. You can have an opinion. You might listen to it briefly, but you’re the only one. The league’s not going to listen to it” (Brown). Like Dr. Omalu just four years previous, the NFL refused to listen to a qualified person who wants to make the game safer and better. Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy is now an accepted disease that continues to affect and unfortunately take the lives of former NFL players such as Junior Seau, Andre Waters, Tyler Sash, and unfortunately many more who only played on Sunday. Yet the NFL continues with Thursday Night Football, a game that does not give players ample time to recover from the violent, and now, life-threatening game of football.  

The concussion scandal of the early 2000s is not the only outrage the NFL has gone through. Over the years many questionable actions of the NFL have surfaced yet the company continues to thrive. This brings up a point that players, coaches, and fans cannot deny and that is that the NFL is first and foremost a business. This means that their primary goal is to make money and everything else comes after. According to Sean Gregory of Time Magazine, the National Football League has an extensive list of scandals and questionable decisions yet continue to make absurd profits. Gregory particularly calls out the NFL’s handling of the Ray Rice scandal in which the once pro-bowl Raven’s running back was caught on camera knocking his fiancé unconscious and dragging her from an elevator. National Football league players have long since had a reputation for being violent but this is not the criticism Gregory has. Instead, he calls out the NFL’s mishandling of the situation. Rice only received a two-game suspension for the act that made the entire NFL look grossly immoral. The NFL is both a financial and social conglomerate and because of this, the league can get away with more than a fair share of poor decisions without any hit to profits or television ratings and they recognize this. In fact, the Ray Rice scandal benefited the NFL as a business. The very next Ravens game, which took place on Thursday Night Football, more than doubled average ratings. Because of this, the NFL is given no reason to worry about player conduct or safety. The NFL has a substantial presence in American culture and should use this position to set a good example rather than continuously make harmful decisions. The NFL continuously also treats their employees, the players and coaches, with bewildering disrespect and ignorance. Les Carpenter of The Guardian wrote a reactionary article to Richard Sherman’s post to The Players’ Tribune. In his article, Carpenter explains the process in which Thursday Night Football came to be. In short, the NFL created Thursday Night Football as leverage over major broadcasting companies that had rights to the Sunday and Monday games. Because of the exclusivity the NFL had with Thursday night games, they were able to drive up the price for broadcasting companies to gain rights to show the midweek games with the sales pitch “Don’t deny your customers their football” (Carpenter). This shows that the NFL never intended Thursday Night Football to be about the fans who they used as a bargaining chip. The result of this successful pitch by the NFL was a game nobody asked for and extra stress on players’ bodies. Disgruntled employees have never proven to be a positive business model but it works for the NFL whose profits seemingly grow without waiver.

   Football is a such an important component in American culture. For approximately five months out of the year, it dominates sports sections, news, and even a day of the week. With anything as large as the National Football League there are bound to be some flaws, but it is a shame that the NFL has a flaw as glaring as Thursday Night Football. The midweek game has been under mild scrutiny ever since its creation in 2006 but only became a major topic of debate a full decade later when Richard Sherman criticized the game as being a symbol of hypocrisy the NFL had about player safety. Looking back at the beginning of Thursday Night Football, people now see it for what it truly is: a leverage for money, a small sliver of what football truly looks like, and a real threat to the safety of players. Thursday Night Football should not continue simply because it makes one of the most powerful and influential companies in America even more money. It is time to discontinue Thursday Night Football because the NFL should be more focused on the betterment of football which would include listening to fans, coaches, and players who see football drastically different than men in suits. 
