Why Does Thursday Night Football Suck So Much?

Nick Flippers - 10/8/2020

The NFL has been around a long time—since 1920 to be exact, and throughout all this time, fans of the game have experienced many incredible moments watching teams throw that pigskin up and down the gridiron. Although nothing compares to the thrill of Redzone and being able to witness every scoring play happening alongside TV hottie Scott Hanson, there really is something special about a good primetime game. There’s only one issue:

Thursday Night Football sucks!!!!!!

During every normal football week (excluding possible Coronavirus situations—fingers crossed that they don’t occur) there are three primetime games. If you don’t know which nights these games occur on…you’re on the wrong website. So the question that has been asked by many is: Why does Thursday Night Football suck so much. 

Obviously its football, and obviously I’m watching any football game no matter what day it’s being played on, but sometimes I wonder why Thursday Night is almost always the inferior primetime game. I’ve thought about it for a while and so I did some research. I’ve come to this conclusion:

Thursday Night Football doesn’t suck! You suck!

Since the 2010 season there have been a total of 128 TNF games including 3 games that went into overtime (Oddly enough the three overtime games finished with the scores: 23-20, 23-20, 22-20). There was a total of 5,764 points scored by both teams during this time span and an average per-game-score of 45 points between both teams. The average point-deficit between these games was 11.9, but let’s round it up to 12 because there are only whole points in NFL games.

This means that an average Thursday Night score would look something like this:

NE – 29 : ATL – 17

Now this score has a deficit of 12 but a total of 46; unfortunately a 45 point game can not have a deficit of 12—it just isn’t in the math—so I had to use my poetic license a bit. Now, here comes the crazy part. I went and did some research on Monday Night Football because, let’s face it, it’s the best primetime game and guess what I found?

THERE EXACTLY THE SAME!

From 2010-Present, there have 175 MNF games and on average the points scored per game totaled 45.3 (TNF was 45 on the dot!) with an average point-deficit of 12 on the fucking money. Granted there were more overtime games so that is what we like to see come primetime, but the fact of the matter is TNF and MNF are practically the same.

A lot of people are going to say—“it’s all about the matchups!” Well, those people are sheep. Stop hating on Thursday Night Football because it ends up looking very similar (practically the exact same on average) to Monday Night Football. Tonight the Tampa Bay Bucs face off against the Chicago Bears for Thursday Night Football and let’s see if the score turns out to be what it’s supposed to be: 29-17 in Tampa’s favor. 

Also—people—stop hating on Thursday Night Football for no reason. STOP BEING SHEEP!