Former Oakland/Las Vegas Raiders and Tampa Bay Buccaneers head coach Jon Gruden went on a scathing rant about his issues with ‘Thursday Night Football.’
Unfortunately, football fans haven’t exactly been treated to the best quality TNF games here in 2024 (no wonder Al Michaels has sounded bored so often!) So when a guy like Jon Gruden speaks about ‘Thursday Night Football’ in a negative light, it’s certainly worth a listen.
TNF reared its ugliest head yesterday, with the Seattle Seahawks beating the Chicago Bears 6-3 in an all-time snooze fest. And to think just two weeks earlier, the Los Angeles Rams bested the San Francisco 49ers 12-6 in a mostly uneventful game.
During his appearance on “Pardon My Take”, Jon Gruden went into in-depth detail about the problem with Thursday night games, and why he never liked it as a head coach:
“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.
“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.”
Jon Gruden hates Thursday night football for good reason pic.twitter.com/MD6xUG5ybY
— Pardon My Take (@PardonMyTake) December 27, 2024
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Jon Gruden coached his fair share of TNF games during his tenure as an NFL head coach, so he knows better than most about the hassles of playing on a short week.
The NFL expanded its ‘Thursday Night Football’ package in the 2012 season, with the package usually going until the penultimate week of the regular season. In some years, prior to the 18-week schedule, TNF game broadcasts ended in Week 15.
NFL Should Listen To Jon Gruden
The NFL isn’t about to cancel weekly TNF games during the regular season. Not after signing a lucrative long-term deal with Amazon Prime Video. But there are ways to work around the “short week” issues.
The league should at least work the majority of TNF games around a time where teams don’t have to play on such short weeks. They can easily limit the occasions where a team has to play twice in four days, and it’d be nice if marquee teams like Kansas City, Detroit and Buffalo weren’t forced to play multiple TNF games a year.
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