On Thursday, December 5, at 8:25 ET, an NFL football game between Jacksonville and Houston will be televised on the NFL network. Do not watch this football game! This is a blog about sports, written by a sports fan for non-sports fans, but today, I’m writing to all the sports fans out there. If you are a regular non-sports fan reader pass this along to the sports fans in your life! Unless they are from Jacksonville or Houston, there’s no reason for them to watch this football game and there are plenty of good reasons not to. Here are some of the reasons:
1. Do not watch this football game because the teams playing are horrible
The Jacksonville Jaguars have three wins and nine losses so far this year. They are last in the league in total points scored per game and third to last in total points allowed. Their average game sees them giving up 29.3 points and scoring only 14.5 points. (Football scoring can be complicated, but even it cannot produce decimals — these are just averages.) They have been blown out of many of the games they’ve played this year. Beyond being bad, they’re also uninteresting. Early in the season, Jaguars fans held a rally to urge their team to sign popular but probably incompetent quarterback Tim Tebow. Even this was ineffective at driving interest in the team. Almost no one showed up. Tebow, despite fake rumors of the contrary from eyeofthetiber.com, remains unsigned.[1]
If it’s possible, the Houston Texans are an even more depressing team. Their record, two wins and ten losses, is worse than the Jaguars. The Texans are fourth worst in the league in terms of points scored (19.2) and sixth worst in points allowed (26.9). Unlike Jaguars fans, fans of the Texans were not prepared for this type of season. The previous two years, the Texans were 10-6 and 12-4 and won their division both times. There were no real hints that things were going to go so badly this year, but they did. Their starting quarterback caught a bad case of the yips (according to Wikipedia, “the apparent loss of fine motor skills without apparent explanation, in one of a number of different sports”) and threw interceptions that were returned for defensive touchdowns in four straight games before getting injured and subsequently benched. Their star running back, Arian Foster, is out for the rest of the year after back surgery. Their best defensive player, Brian Cushing, is also out for the year with a torn ligament in his knee and a broken leg. To add injury to injury, their head coach suffered a “warning stroke” at halftime of a game.
2. Do not watch this football game because it will be bad for your social life
Here’s the deal. It’s getting late in the season. Your friends, family, and significant others have lived through thirteen weeks of football so far and you KNOW that you’re going to want to watch a bunch more football because now it’s the fantasy football playoffs (more on that later) and the real playoffs will follow shortly after that. Last week was Thanksgiving, so there were not one, not two, but three football games on Thursday and though we argued for the inclusion of football in Thanksgiving celebrations, it’s an accommodation that your non-sports fan friends and family made for you. Don’t push it. Make dinner, go to a movie, play a card game, studiously avoid decorating the festivus pole. Do anything, but do not watch this football game.
3. Do not watch this football game because it doesn’t even have any fantasy implications
I know, I know, it’s not a good game, it’s not an important game, but it’s the fantasy football playoffs! In most fantasy leagues, the playoffs begin this week and normally this would drive people to pay close attention to even the most mundane football game. Seriously though, if you have been counting on a player from one of these teams, it’s unlikely your team has qualified for the fantasy playoffs. There’s really not too many players in this game who should be starting on your fantasy team this week anyway. Sure, wide receiver Andre Johnson and running backs Ben Tate and Maurice Jones-Drew are decent plays most weeks, but it’s a reasonably well-studied fact that players perform worse during Thursday games. I say, don’t count on any of these players, do not watch the game, and thank me later.
4. Do not watch this game because watching it is bad for football and terrible for football players
This is the most interesting and most compelling argument for why you should not watch this game. Playing a game on Thursday night, just four days after the previous Sunday’s game, is absolutely brutal. MMQB.com ran a wonderful article about this by Robert Klemko, which initially inspired this post. In it, Klemko quotes Texans offensive lineman, Duane Brown:
“That Friday, everything was hurting; knees, hands, shoulders,” he remembers. “I didn’t get out of bed until that night. I didn’t leave the house at all. You talk about player safety, but you want to extend the season and add Thursday games? It’s talking out of both sides of your mouth.”
“Knees, hands, shoulders” are one thing but heads are another entirely. We’re still learning about concussions but a few things are reasonably clear. Players will hide concussions from their teams and try to play despite them. The most dangerous thing that can happen to a player who is concussed is to get concussed again and this is more likely the less rest they have after their first concussions. Playing games with less than six days of rest is painful and dangerous.
If we give the NFL the benefit of the doubt (which I’m not positive we should) about being sincerely concerned for player safety, how can we rationalize their expansion of the NFL schedule to include more and more Thursday games? Klemko writes that the value of those games to the league is enormous — estimated at over $700 million dollars per year on top of making the NFL network (which televises most of the Thursday night games) a viable network. And it’s our viewing, particularly of bad match-ups like this one, that drives that value. Klemko writes:
Putting aside for a moment the injury concerns, who would actually want to watch these 14 games featuring fatigued players, often pitting bad teams against good ones, or worse, the 2-10 Texans vs. the 3-9 Jaguars (8:25 PM ET, Thursday, NFL Network)?
Answer: EVERYBODY.
“You have Houston and Jacksonville, which no one is looking forward to,” Ourand says, “but even that game is going to win the night on cable within the male demographics everybody sells, and it will be one of the top 5 or 10 shows on TV. The power of the NFL and why they want to go to Thursday is more evident in this game than in any other.”
So far at least, that seems to be true. Fans, including myself, have watched the Thursday games faithfully. I can’t say I’m completely happy about it though. I think it seriously dilutes the NFL experience. There’s something special about isolating all of the games on Sunday (and Monday night.) It makes every Sunday an anticipated event; a miniature holiday of the football denomination. I am particularly frustrated about the Thursday game’s impact on my enjoyment of fantasy football. Part of the fun of fantasy football is approaching a Sunday full of football knowing that, like in each game that day, you start 0-0 and anything could happen. The Thursday game almost always means that instead of that “anything could happen” feeling, you have a “oh, I’m ahead, I should win this” feeling or a “oh man, I’m definitely not going to win” feeling. It’s a lot less fun that way.
For this Thursday, at least, let’s do our part for the players, for our relationships, for our sanity, and not watch the football game.
- Thanks Dad for passing me this delightful article↵