Seattle Seahawks cornerback Richard Sherman never shies away from speaking on hot button topics. This week, Sherman takes on the NFL‘s Thursday Night Football. Following a Seahawks lost to the Green Bay Packers on Sunday, the team begins week 15 on Thursday hosting the Los Angeles Rams.
Sherman calls Thursday games a “poop fest” because teams aren’t recovered from Sunday.
via ESPN:
“Poopfest. It’s terrible,” Sherman said. “We got home like 1 o’clock in the morning, something like that on Monday and then you’ve got to play again. Congratulations, NFL, you did it again. But they’ve been doing it all season, so I guess we’re the last ones to get the middle finger.”
He has taken the league to task on a number of things this season, but he said Thursday night games are among the top five issues he has with the NFL.
“Because it’s just no regard,” Sherman said. “It’s hypocritical, as I’ve stated before. They make this huge stance about player safety. Then you put the players in tremendous danger.
“We’ll be well-aware come the next CBA negotiations about things like this. There’s really not much you can do right now. It’s part of the revenue, etc., etc. And the league probably has something else up their sleeve. They might have a Friday night game planned. Who knows?”
Sherman followed up the comments with a further explanation on The Player’s Tribune
On his “Poopfest” comments:
O.K., maybe it wasn’t the most eloquent way to describe it, but I call it like I see it. I mean, you gotta call a spade a spade.
The whole idea of Thursday Night Football is terrible. It’s ludicrous. It’s hypocritical.
It’s a poopfest.
The NFL preaches player safety. The league says it wants to do everything in its power to protect its players. But when it comes down to it, it’s not the players that the NFL protects.
It’s the Shield.
On Thursday night games:
Your body isn’t ready. You’re still sore from Sunday’s game. You’re going to go out there and compete and give everything you have, because that’s what you do. But your body just won’t have as much to give as it would have had on a full week’s rest.
That’s why the quality of play has been so poor on Thursday nights this season. We’ve seen blowouts, sloppy play and games that have been almost unwatchable — and it’s not the players’ faults. Their bodies just aren’t ready to play. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the Cowboys-Vikings game a couple of weeks ago was the best TNF game we’ve seen this season. You know why?
Because they both played on Thanksgiving the week before, so they each had a full week off.
Thursday Night Football is just another example of the NFL’s hypocrisy: The league will continue a practice that diminishes the on-field product and endangers its players, but as long as the dollars keep rolling in, it couldn’t care less.
On the NFL and other possible solutions:
Like I’ve said before, the NFL is a bottom-line business. As long as fans are tuning in and advertisers are paying to be featured on Thursday Night Football, it’s not going anywhere. So I don’t know what the solution is. Maybe the league should take away one preseason game and add a second bye week for each team, which would occur before its Thursday game. That way, at least teams would have a full week to recover and prepare. (Or we could get rid of the preseason altogether … but that’s another issue for another day.)
