Stating the obvious

Two nights ago, for, like, the 1,457th Thursday night in a row, I did not watch the NFL's Thursday night game.

Not a down. Not a snap. Couldn't have cared less if it had been Thursday Night Readings of John Stuart Mill instead of Thursday Night Football.

This puts me on the same side of the fence with the Bills' Richie Incognito, which frankly unnerves me. Incognito says Thursday games suck. He says they're just a cash grab and take the wind out of the NFL's windy pronouncements about how much they care about player safety. He says, in so many words, that football at the NFL level is not a sport in which a mere three days between games are enough.

I hate to agree with Richie Incognito, who remains an incorrigible rockhead and bully. But he's dead-on right here.

Thursday night football is nothing but a callous cash grab. And it's hurting the product besides.

That's the latest meme now from the media, which has suddenly decided one of the NFL's problems is there is simply too much NFL. Both the Wall Street Journal and Sports Business Journal have written about it. Deadspin has written about the WSJ and SBJ writing about it. The NFL is, apparently, overexposed.

Here's the thing about that: It's not something that just happened.

Fact is, there's been too much NFL for awhile now, because for nearly 365 days of the year you can't get away from it. It's not just the fall, when the NFL is on the box from 1 p.m. to 11 p.m. on Sundays, again on Monday night, again on Thursday night, and (once the calendar clears Thanksgiving) again on Saturday. And now that the league is sending its product to London on a semi-regular basis, Sunday mornings aren't even free of the Shield.

(About that: Why do the NFL poobahs insist on believing that England gives a tinker's damn about American football? Do they really think Brits are going to quit Arsenal vs. Man City on Sundays to watch the Browns and the Vikings? And if you're trying to showcase your product, why in God's name are you sending the Browns?)

Anyway ... it's not just all those games. It's that sports media is obsessed with the NFL even when the games aren't being played. A sportswriter friend of mine once quipped that ESPN's programming consisted of the NFL, the NFL Draft, NFL training camps and LeBron James. He wasn't far off the mark.

So, yes, the NFL is suffering from market saturation. People simply don't need a football fix every 30 seconds or so. And when you throw college football, which now plays on every day of the week except Sunday and Monday ... well, it's pretty obvious. That's just too much football.

(Although I have to say, I spend a lot more Saturdays sutured to my couch than Sundays. This is because college football is far, far better than pro football, because there are actual historic rivalries in college football, and every week there are huge games that actually matter. The NFL has no true rivalries anymore. And so there are no single games that inspire true passion during the long slog of the regular season. Cowboys-vs.-Redskins ain't the Iron Bowl or Army-Navy or the Red River Shootout, no matter what the league's broadcast partners try to tell you.)

Look. Hugely successful corporate entities like the NFL almost always make the same faulty assumption, which is that if playing twice a week has made them hugely successful, playing four times a week will make them even more hugely successful. It hardly ever works out that way; in fact, eventually it causes the hugely successful corporate entity to implode more often than not.

That probably won't happen to the NFL, mind you. But making people wait from Monday night to Sunday for your product?

That would be a solid business decision. Which is why it won't happen.