This is an accurate representation of me most Thursday nights, including the game this week where Biscuits beat the Texans. I was assembling some IKEA furniture on Thursday and suddenly remembered there was a game I wanted to see on TV and lo and behold, it was the two minute warning. Even after several seasons, I just can’t really get TNF ingrained into my schedule.

This is pretty much my main complaint with TNF since it’s inception. This is a highly biased personal opinion here, but I think Football should be a weekend thing. Saturday for you college fans. Sunday for us Pro fans. Monday night as like a little mini optional desert to the weekend’s main course, but it still feels connected because it’s just the next day and I’d wager most fans are like me and they’ve spent most of monday procrastinating and reading football news from the weekend’s games. Thursday night feels so…removed, especially since it’s Pro ball, which means after Thursday’s appetizer you have to wait 2 days for more. I feel like it was intended to make it so football has a primetime presence for a good percentage of the week so “you can watch football whenever!”but it has the opposite effect of making the TNF games feel bizarrely isolated and stupid. The teams don’t like them due to the limited recovery and practice time. I bet every other network hates them because it’s impossible to really put a show up against football and get solid ratings.  On top of that half the games are pretty shit. For every Jets/Bills we get at least two Texans/Pats.

The thing is during the week I’m just not in a football zone. The week is for work. Football is the end of week reward. I’m going about my usual weeknight stuff (work, relaxing if I’m done work, making dinner, whatnot) and then I remember a game is on and it’s irritating because I’ve already missed a portion of it but I feel like I have to watch it to keep up with everything. TNF feels like something for casual fans who can just turn it on if they feel like it, and an active annoyance for die-hards who have to set aside another separate 3 1/2 hours to keep up for fantasy purposes or just watercooler chat.

I might feel more charitable towards it if I still lived on the eastern time zone. Football interrupts weeknight dinner in PST so my mind is usually elseware Thursday nights. I love 5:30 primetime games on the weekend and I love how all the night games end at 9:30 (Waaaaaay better than EST games) but the 5:30 start time really makes TNF forgettable, probably more forgettable than it would be on the EST because I’m usually done being an adult by 8pm. Yet I never have this issue on Mondays. So maybe TNF is just stupid.

Hmmm, TNF gives us an extra 3 hours of Phil Simms every week, so maybe there is something to that hypothesis.