Drew Brees blasts Thursday Night Football
 

Drew Brees blasts Thursday NFL games after several Saints suffer injuries

Scott Gleeson, USA TODAY Sports
Published 8:24 a.m. ET Dec. 8, 2017


Following a handful of injuries in his team's 20-17 loss to the Atlanta Falcons on Thursday night, New Orleans Saints quarterback Drew Brees took aim at Thursday Night Football games when speaking with reporters.

Brees said Thursday games are "absolutely" unsafe — due to little rest players receive after Sunday games — and he thinks the NFL's high injury rate is "One-hundred percent a product of playing on Thursday night."

"Do you understand what guys' bodies go through in a game?" Brees told reporters, via the The (New Orleans) Times-Picayune. "And then to have to turn around four days later and to play? ... Is this smart as it pertains to guys' health and safety? No, absolutely not."

As a longtime players' union leader, Brees said he plans to have the issue "addressed."

"When you see guys go down, when you lose guys for what you think is unnecessary just because you put them at a much higher risk in such a quick turnaround, that gets you upset," he said.

The Saints (9-4) suffered a slew of injuries on Thursday, including running back Alvin Kamara, who left in the first quarter due to a concussion. Other New Orleans injuries included safety Kenny Vaccaro (groin), linebacker A.J. Klein (groin), guard Senio Kelemete (concussion) and defensive end Trey Hendrickson (ankle).

Brees joined a long list of players who have publicly blasted Thursday games. Seattle's Doug Baldwin said last month that Thursday games should be "illegal" after his teammate Richard Sherman suffered a season-ending achilles tear Nov. 9 against the Arizona Cardinals in a Thursday game.


https://www.usatoday.com/story/sport...ies/933811001/

Good. Thursday games are ****ing garbage.

Agree! Well stated Brees

Yup....tnf is trash.

Can't wait to see what kind of ratings they'll get next week when the Colts battle the Donks! Maybe PBS will have a good English soap opera scheduled to give us something interesting to watch. TNF needs to go the way of the covered wagon.

We just need a whole lot less NFL right now. Keep SNF and MNF, and shove the rest of that shit into a Sunday afternoon slot and call it good. The only time I'm tempted to watch a TNF game for more than 6 minutes is when we're playing.

Silly Question,

If the Owners want a Thursday night game, and Games in London and Mexico and wherever. Would increasing the 53 man roster to say 65 help alleviate some of the issues?

Meaning if you had more quality depth and could rotate people in and out to give more rest to players, would that bring down the injuries that have been happening?

Just wondering

There are more posts in this thread than there were people in the stands last night.

Axe at least one preseason game, add a second bye-week and make a scheduling rule that doesn't allow any team to participate in any game with fewer than six days' rest.

I agree that the Thursday night games are horrible, but Brees' comment that the injury rate is higher during these games is not backed up by facts. The games are horrible because of the lack of preparation between games.

None of these rants ever seem to mention that injury stats for Thursday nights are the same as they are for Sunday nights.

He only whining cause he lost.

<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-lang="en"><p lang="en" dir="ltr">The Saints have suffered a spate of 1st half injuries tonight. But are TNF games any more dangerous than Sunday games? Per our data...not really.<a href="https://t.co/EoYorhxks8">https://t.co/EoYorhxks8</a> <a href="https://t.co/sHdf1gaWaW">pic.twitter.com/sHdf1gaWaW</a></p>&mdash; Zachary Binney (@zbinney_NFLinj) <a href="https://twitter.com/zbinney_NFLinj/status/938966068357451777?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">December 8, 2017</a></blockquote>
<script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>

TNF is a bad product which dilutes MNF and SNF. Instead of having Saints-Falcons on MNF, we get a low quality version on TNF. Meanwhile MNF is left with Panthers-Dolphins.

Player safety is so important. Yeah right. NFL doesn't care about bones and ligaments, they only care about concussions. If TNF is profitable it'll stay around. Only thing that might wake them up is an ACL-Achilles Lawsuit.

Sad

Drew Brees has spent his entire career bashing the league that made him a millionaire.