Thursday Night Football can be an easy target for criticism. And Jon Gruden shared all the reasons why with the Pardon My Take crew at Barstool Sports.
It was never easier to be a Thursday football hater than Week 17 when the nation had to trudge through an embarrassingly boring game between the Seattle Seahawks and Chicago Bears. The Seahawks “won” by a score of 6-3, which incredibly duplicated a Mariners-White Sox scoreline from earlier this season in Major League Baseball.
One of Gruden’s great strengths as a media personality was his deep dives into topics (see his QB school) and clearly sharing things from a coach’s perspective. In his new role with Barstool Sports, Gruden articulated why the Thursday games often fail to impress.
“On a short week you really don’t get any time to practice. You don’t get any time to really familiarize yourself with the opponent’s blitzes, the coverages that they run, the stunts that they run up front. You don’t get a chance to study their red zone defense, their third down defense, you don’t get a chance to look at them in goal line and short yardage. So there’s very little preparation,” Gruden said.
“And these guys are beat up, man. I don’t like seeing these guys play 61 snaps on Sunday and then have to go play 68 snaps on Thursday. It bothers me. I don’t mind doing it on Thanksgiving, I think it’s a wonderful thing. But I do believe when you’re playing Thursday football there’s very little preparation, there’s very little time to recover, and it’s going to take its toll on the performance. You don’t just show up. This is not Major League Baseball where we can play a doubleheader. It’s not the NBA, no disrespect. This is a lot of physical contact, man. A lot of these guys are hurting, they are really sucking it up right now to play,” he added.
And Dan Katz made a great point as well with some of the NFL’s best teams, like the Baltimore Ravens, playing a ridiculous 3 games in 11 days. It hasn’t seemed to bother Lamar Jackson and company for now, but the impact and the wear and tear of playing so often in such a short span certainly can’t be helpful for them heading into the postseason.
But this is the universe that we live in. The appetite for the NFL has never been higher and networks are willing to pay hundreds of millions of dollars to have their own exclusive window. And the NFL is happy to play along and put games on pretty much every single day of the week. But as Jon Gruden stated so clearly, the product on the field and health of the players will suffer along the way.
About Matt Yoder