Dear NFL: Short weeks issue solved

Roger Goddell, DeMaurice Smith, & NFL Owners: All Thursday games can have normal rest.

Question: How do you reduce the risk of injuries for NFL Thursday Night Football games?

Answer: Simple. No more short-rest weeks. How? The solution is posted in this article.

There was another flurry of protest from NFL players after the league announced on March 28 the approval of allowing teams to play two games per season on short-rest weeks. The NFL also announced tabling “Thursday night flex scheduling,” which is a good idea after seeing tweets from some players around the league. There were tweets by current players like Patrick Mahomes and Devon Kennard and recently retired players like J.J. Watt and Robert Griffin III. Many former and current players have voiced their displeasure over the years about the dangers of playing Thursday night games on short rest. NFL players want to remind the league that player safety should be paramount in decisions regarding Thursday Night Football. Mahomes used a facepalm emoji to voice his displeasure with the decision to schedule some teams with two Thursday night games with short rest. The tweets made by Watt and Griffin III speak for themselves. There is a solution to end all short-rest weeks in the NFL schedule while keeping Thursday Night Football intact. For readers who want to go directly to the solution that allows normal rest for all Thursday games, you can skip this section regarding the recent history of the debate surrounding this short-rest week issue and scroll down to the section named “The Solution.”

Remember all the buzz in November and December of 2017 from NFL players about how horrible it was to have Thursday night football games on the schedule?

If not, allow me to refresh your memory.

It all started a year earlier when Richard Sherman had an article published in The Players’ Tribune on December 15, 2016, titled “Why I Hate Thursday Night Football.”

Sherman started the article by saying, “The whole idea of Thursday Night Football is terrible. It’s ludicrous. It’s hypocritical. The NFL preaches player safety. The league says it wants to do everything in its power to protect its players. But when it comes down to it, it’s not the players that the NFL protects. It’s the Shield.”

He explained in detail what an NFL player goes through during a typical rest week leading up to a Sunday game, followed by a short rest week for a Thursday game. Sherman later pointed out how J.J. Watt of the Arizona Cardinals had a season-ending back injury during a Thursday night game.

Then, 11 months later, Sherman ruptured his Achilles tendon on November 9, 2017, against the Cardinals during a Thursday night game in an ironic twist of fate. He was out for the rest of the season.

The debate intensified four weeks later when quarterback Drew Brees of the New Orleans Saints went off in a press conference after a 20-17 loss to the Atlanta Falcons on a Thursday night game.

Brees did not say anything about the loss. However, he had much to say about six teammates getting injured during the game after a short rest week.

“It’s 100 percent a product of playing on Thursday night,” Brees said. “We worry about what we can control. We play the games that are on the schedule and play them when they say we do. But, when you see guys go down, it seems unnecessary because you put them at a much higher risk with such a quick turnaround.”

Many players around the league had similar quotes late in the 2017 NFL season.

Toward the end of Sherman’s 2016 article on “Why I Hate Thursday Night Football,” he said:

“The league will continue a practice that diminishes the on-field product and endangers its players, but as long as the dollars keep rolling in, it couldn’t care less. Like I’ve said before, the NFL is a bottom-line business. As long as fans are tuning in and advertisers are paying to be featured on Thursday Night Football, it’s not going anywhere.”

And the dollars do keep rolling in.

After the 2017 season ended, Fox swooped in and nabbed a 5-year deal to do NFL Thursday Night games for a whopping $660 million per year.

As if that was not enough money, the NFL announced an 11-year deal with Amazon Prime for about $1 billion annually to broadcast Thursday Night Football from 2023 through 2033. However, since Fox wanted out of the final year of their contract, Amazon Prime took over the 2022 season, which finalizes this deal at roughly $13 billion for 12 seasons.

So Sherman is right. Thursday Night Football is not going anywhere.

The irony continues with Sherman and Thursday Night Football because he was an analyst on the Amazon Prime telecast last season. The 6-time Pro Bowler and 5-time All-Pro was in the studio for pregame, halftime, and postgame shows and did a fantastic job. I am happy he is back for the 2023 season with Amazon Prime.

In an article by Gilbert McGregor of the Sporting News, Sherman wanted to clarify that he was not complaining in that 2016 article about Thursday Night Football games. Instead, he made it clear that he was searching for an alternative. And to quote Sherman from that article, he did say, ”I don’t know what the solution is.”

Well, Richard. There is a solution, and here it is.

Chart #1 will show how all 32 teams can play on Thursday Night Football or Thanksgiving and will have no less than the usual six days rest for every game during the 2023 season. The chart is also a template for all future seasons of 17 games during an 18-week schedule. This chart also handles the Amazon Prime Black Friday game announced in early March that will take place on November 24, 2023. Both teams playing this Friday afternoon game will also have full rest.

The reason for two-midweek games to start the season is to avoid byes in Week 1. Those two games can be split into a Wednesday Kickoff Classic on 9/6/2023 and a Thursday night game on 9/7.

One attraction of this schedule is that it creates a slot for two premier NFL teams (Teams 1 and 2) to play three Thursday night games during the season. In addition, there are slots for four other top-rated teams (Teams 3, 4, 23, and 28) to play two Thursday games.

The NFL adopted the current format in 2012, where either 30 or 32 teams play Thursday night or Thanksgiving games on short rest once, depending on the total number of Thursday games with short rest. However, in 2022, the Dallas Cowboys and Tennessee Titans played two games on Thursday with short rest. These teams played twice because the NFL added an extra Thursday night game for 2022 due to the Amazon Prime contract.

NFL players will not want to play two contests per season on short rest. The players already are mostly against playing one game on short rest. This schedule maps out how all 32 teams can play all Thursday games with normal rest.

The buzz about having “flex games” on Thursday and the NFL players’ reactions to that idea got me thinking about how the NFL can avoid that mess. So I devised another chart to give the NFL an option to eliminate their six lowest-rated teams from Thursday’s prime-time games. Eliminating those six teams will allow higher-rated teams to play additional games on Thursday with normal rest. This chart also includes the Amazon Prime Black Friday game, with two teams also playing with full rest.

So Chart #2 is the better option for the league moving forward to help increase the ratings of Thursday night games while maintaining full rest for all Thursday games.

The immediate upside for this chart is higher ratings for the NFL on Thursday night games. The top two premier NFL teams still have three Thursday night games. However, compared to just four on Chart #1, ten top-rated teams are now playing two games on Thursday (Teams 3 through 12). The NFL can eliminate their six lowest-rated teams (Teams 27 through 32) from Thursday prime-time games.

These games also provide the standard six days’ rest for every team. This option may be an excellent way to eliminate the talk about a future “flex game” on Thursday night.

Some may say the one downside to this template is that the schedule has 14 bye weeks with early-season and late-season bye weeks. However, having at least 15 games every week (except for Week 11, which has 13 games) is a plus for the Red Zone Channel and fantasy football leagues. Also, the NFL can rotate who gets early and late season byes annually.

I believe these two charts are self-explanatory. You plug in the team names in the far left column. You can see their corresponding bye weeks in the far right column, and their Thursday games are in the middle. All empty yellow boxes in the middle of the chart also designate the bye weeks for those teams. The green boxes are the teams playing the Amazon Prime Black Friday game on November 24.

This “bonus” chart is for NFL fans who want to know all 17 opponents your favorite team will play in 2024 once the final standings are complete for 2023.

For 2025, use columns A and D from 2021 and B and C from 2022 to find your team’s opponents. Or send me a tweet on Twitter (@brewers7) after the 2024 season and ask me to map out the next six seasons for you.

So, NFL executives, Owners, General Managers, the NFL Players Association, and NFL players now have a solution to have full rest for all scheduled games.

You are welcome.

To download PDF files for these 3 charts, click on the following links:

Chart_#1

Chart_#2

Chart_#3