Eric Thomas: I Hate Thursday Night Football

The NFL announced that Thursday night football on the NFL Network will be expanded next season, starting at week 2. Seeing as how the league traditionally kicks off on a Thursday, this means all year.

I hate Thursday night football. A lot. The fact that it is being expanded only draws a thick, unbroken line under a fact I cannot run away from: The NFL is going downhill, and will be tough to watch in a few years. This really bums me out. I did not go to Michigan or Michigan State, so deep down I don't care about them as much. I like watching the college game mostly because its football and it's on television. But the NFL has been king for a while now, and it became king by adhering to simple principles: Don't spread out the schedule and make every game count.

I don't get it. When listing the most popular sports in America, the NFL is arguably the top 3, nothing else comes even sort of close. The NFL sells just about every single seat they put on sale with exception of Ohio where economy has reduced the population to foragers and highwaymen who pause their wilding only to occasionally shout something rude about LeBron James. No other sport can claim that kind of success rate. The Super Bowl is a national holiday. The World Series prays that they can get the kind of ratings the Super Bowl gets in the pregame show.

So why mess with it? I see Thursday night football as the first step toward an 18 game season and I beg of them to reconsider. I suppose this is the sports equivalent to running out on my lawn and shaking a cane at imagined grievances. It just seems like the NFL is going to keep changing until the game is a shadow of its former self. It started with league parity, which has given way to eroding quality of play. The AFC was more or less unwatchable, a product so paltry that Tim Tebow made it to the second round of the playoffs. If that cancer infects the rest of the league it's going to ruin my weekends.

What makes the NFL so great is every game is an event unto itself. There are teams that are on the Draft clock a month into the season and if it gets spread out we will lose that. If greed wins the day and games are expanded further the NFL will lose the sense of urgency that makes the game the best in the world. Baseball got greedy and kept expanding the season until largely the first three months of the season are irrelevant. In the coming decades I see this happening to football and it fills me with sadness.

But then again, they have us. We are going to watch, listen and obsess. There is simply no way out of this. They are going to make the league less fun to watch and we are just going to have to take it. Too bad. I suppose if I like the NFL even 50% less, I will still watch every game. So count me among the sheep. Baaa.