Before you say anything, I love football. I’m glad the season is underway and is back,but what I’m not liking is the quality of play on Thursdays. The results are in and there is no quality of the games whatsoever.

Now,we’ve had this experiment of Thursday Night Football since 2006, originally with five games on Thursdays in 2006 and 2007. In 2008, the league expanded Thursday night games to eight and by 2011 that total rose to 13 games. Last season some of the most unwatchable games in terms of match-ups of teams who weren’t going anywhere in the standings were aired. This year,CBS took over production and have aired the first three of the eight games they will air on their network. The other eight will appear on NFL network. The match-ups have been a lot better,but the results have been disappointing.

Week One saw the Super Bowl Champion Seattle Seahawks pummel the Green Bay Packers at home 36-16. To be fair,those two teams were fresh and hadn’t played a real game in six months,but a blowout is a blowout. Week Two (CBS’ first Thursday night-er) saw a Baltimore Ravens team,amidst the Ray Rice controversy, man-handle the Steelers 26-6. But wait,it’s gets worse.

Devin Hester and the Falcons high-stepped their way to a 56-14  win over Tampa Bay on Sept. 18.

The Atlanta Falcons jump out to a 56-0 lead against the Tampa Bay Buccaneers (who looked awful in both their performance on the field and in terms of their uniforms as well) before they finally let them back in it to get 14 measly points. I think I tuned out after 35-0. The Tampa Bay Times labeled this as the worst Thursday Night Football game in history.

After three games that weren’t even close you would think at some point we’d get a closer game on a Thursday,right? Wrong!

The New York Giants (who suck), took on the Washington Redskins in their house and actually looked like a team that meant business for a change. Unfortunately that did not result in a close game by any means and the Giants won 45-14. I believe I tuned out at 35-14 and watched a Giants-Padres game that was 10 times better than anything the Redskins and Giants did that night.

As much as I love watching football where and when I can,Thursday night games are not watchable at all, and I have a feeling it’s only going to get worse. I think the reason why the games are so bad is because the teams coming into those games are tired as hell,have only four days to prepare and get out there and one team gets gassed early and cannot recover. The thing that sucks is that there’s not much anyone,whether it’s the league,CBS,or NFL Network, can really do about it. Despite the boatracing scores,ratings are actually quite good for the Thursday games, the only thing I can see happening to get these games eliminated from our lives once and for all is to not watch. 

Now,I’m okay with the league starting a special Thursday game and of course, the Thanksgiving games (one of the things I love about the holiday is football itself), but other than that, let’s stop over-saturating the football landscape with games on days where we don’t need games that don’t warrant quality play.