Don't Dilute Sunday

Sundays in the fall are a special weekly tradition, much like the sabbath for sports worshippers like me. The ability to find a TV equipped with the Sunday Ticket package (any sports bar or DirecTV-subscribing household should do) and watch more than a half a dozen NFL football games at once is unlike any other professional sports-watching experience, and is rivaled only by the NCAA basketball tournament (and that's only a few weekends a year). While I'm not really a sports bar kind of guy, I still loving sitting at home on Sunday afternoon and watching the Giants on FOX, some of the Jets on CBS and whatever other game the networks might be showing, all while getting in-game updates from the studio. Sunday is a day for football, and I love the way so much action is concentrated into one six or seven hour span.

I'm guessing that most NFL fans view Monday Night Football (MNF) and the newly-added Thursday Night Football (TNF) as fantastic additions to the weekly football schedule. After all, spreading games out across the days of the week gives fans more opportunties to watch football. Now fans don't have to wait an entire week to see NFL teams in action - no longer do we have more than a three-day span without an NFL game. Rather than pretending that we're interested in the NHL because there's nothing else to do, now we can spend Sunday watching football, Monday watching MNF, Tuesday dissecting MNF, Wednesday previewing TNF, Thursday watching TNF, Friday dissecting TNF, and Saturday previewing the Sunday games while watching college football. This has to be viewed as a good thing for football-loving fans, right?

I don't agree. Sure, it's nice having a mid-week game to watch, especially if it's a good one like tonight's Chicago vs. Green Bay matchup. But I see a number of problems with this revised scheduling. One, it asks a lot of the NFL players to play on a Thursday after a Sunday, and also creates a lot of long layoffs for teams that play on Thursday and then don't have another game until the following Sunday. Similarly, it wreaks havoc on fantasy football - it's much harder to set lineups efficiently when you have to make key decisions on Thursday afternoon, and forces diehard players like me to spend Friday and Saturday agonizing over scores that never used to exist. It's bad enough that many games are decided on Monday night - the addition of Thursday night games effectively quadruples the length of each weekly fantasy game from one night to four.

Most significantly, though, I'm worried that the Thursday night game might set a precedent that could, over time, erode the specialness of Sunday afternoon football. What's to stop the NFL from breaking up its schedule and having games during each night of the week, selling a nightly package to the highest bidder ("It's Tuesday Night Football, only on FX!") and rendering the Sunday afternoon sports bar experience a thing of the past?  While Thursday Night Football might be a big revenue opportunity for the NFL and it's NFL Network, the league should be careful and avoid spoiling a large part of what has made football the nation's most popular sport.