Thursday Night Football

Thursday Night Football has been nothing but bad. It has to come to an end.

I can’t watch the games because they’re all on NFL Network, which Time Warner Cable does not carry and which comes with a heftier price tag than I would be willing to pay even if I could get it, which I can’t because Time Warner bought out Adelphia in this area so the game is unavailable at any price and I don’t want to go to a sports bar to watch a game I probably don’t care all that much about anyway.

It advances the dates on which I must make my fantasy football picks. This is problematic because it forces me to choose my players for the week before injury reports are published and I can have some idea of who will play and who won’t on Sunday. This has played havoc with my standings in my fantasy football pool; ever since Thursday games started, my team partner and I have been leaving astonishing numbers of points on our bench and playing guys who, if we had access to the information we had before the Thursday games forced us to make our decisions prematurely, we would have known to have sat. So this is potentially costing me money, too.

If I could get it, and I were willing to pay for it, and the reporting problems could somehow be circumvented, then I’d have to deal with The Wife being bugged by me spending another three hours a week parked in front of the TV watching a football game. She gets agitated enough on Sundays — she hides in her office, doing crafts or playing games on the computer, while I watch the game that’s on TV and follow the internet reporting of other games, and she can’t wait for the instant the play clock reaches zero so she can switch the channel to one of her shows about lampshades. It’s tense enough on Sundays, and adding another day of that to the mix — especially late in the season when pro games start to bleed over into Saturdays to fill the void left by the completion of the college season — is a recipie for having more days than not (Thursday, Saturday, Sunday, and Monday) filled with football, and that’s just too much for my pretty young wife to handle.

Dallas and Detroit should each play a game on Thanksgiving. And that should be it for Thursday Night Football for an entire year.