In recent years, the NFL staged 16 total Thursday games after the first Sunday of the season. With every team playing in one of those games, the competitive disadvantage of playing on a Thursday after playing on a Sunday was spread evenly among all teams.
This year, with the NFLN/CBS package including 14 games instead of last year’s 13-game slate on NFLN, the league will conduct a total of 17 Thursday games after the first Sunday of the season. (Three short-week games are played on Thanksgiving, but not televised by NFLN.) The change means that two teams will play an extra Thursday game after Week One.
The fairest (or perhaps more accurately least unfair) approach would be to park the extra Thursday game immediately after a mutual bye week for the two teams that will play in it. While that would necessarily shrink the bye for the two teams playing in the extra Thursday game, it would avoid a pair of four-day turnarounds for any NFL team.
Of course, the league doesn’t seem to be overly concerned about the four-day turnaround, continuously citing the notion that the injury rate is no higher for games played on a short week. But that misses the real point; for players with pre-existing injuries, it’s harder to get ready to play in the Thursday night game.
