It's time to kill Thursday Night Football

There have now been five full seasons of the phenomenon they call Thursday Night Football, and honestly, that's five more seasons than was necessary.

The NFL's attempt to trick fans into blocking off another night of the week to watch its brand of sloppy, dangerous, brightly colored football is insulting.

It's insulting to the players, who are forced to put their bodies on the line after a short week of preparation and recovery.

It's insulting to the coaches, who have to put together game plans with limited practice and meeting time before contests that could decide their careers.

It's insulting to the fans, who aren't expected to notice the drop-off in quality - but are expected to continue throwing money at a league that doesn't need any more of it.

Richard Sherman may have summed it up best in a recent piece for the Players' Tribune.

"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," he wrote. "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."

But it should.

When you watch football Thursday, it may look like a real NFL game on the surface, but it's actually quite different from the normal product. Every game in today's NFL requires meticulous levels of preparation and medical treatment. Each week is carefully planned to help players recover from their last game and be ready for the next one.

By cutting out three days in order to cram in an extra contest during an untapped television spot, half of that goes out the window. Players don't get the required time to recover from the grueling contest they just played, often resulting in a heightened number of inactive players.

By the third week of the season or so, every player in the league is dealing with a few bumps and bruises, at the very least. When players force themselves to fight through injuries, their risk of re-injury increases greatly. Sure, every game involves some risk, but it just happened to be Thursday night games that knocked out All-Pro defenders J.J. Watt, Luke Kuechly, and Michael Bennett this season.

Coaches are forced to throw together game plans with less preparation, meeting, and practice time. Sometimes they're forced to use a previous game plan with just a few small adjustments because they realistically don't have enough time to implement another strategy.

In a league that likes to preach parity, game-planning can be the equalizer that allows a young, up-and-coming team to take down a veteran unit. This season, veteran quarterbacks went 11-6 against their less-experienced counterparts on Thursdays. Four of those losses came at the hands of rookie sensation Dak Prescott (twice), Marcus Mariota, and defending MVP Cam Newton. Teams are forced to depend on whatever players they have available to prepare themselves and, often, rely on having more talent than their opponents as opposed to taking a full-team approach.

Some argue that all football is good football, just like all pizza is good pizza. OK: Let's imagine you're ordering a pizza (stay with me here). You call up the pizza place and they offer you two options:

• You can get your pizza properly made, with all the ingredients you ordered, fully cooked, and it will show up at 7:30 p.m., the same time as your friends' pizzas.
• They can rush to make your pizza, not cook it all the way, use some of the ingredients you ordered - but not all - and it will arrive at 5:00 p.m., in a fancy, bright box.

They're both going to be pizza, but the first option is obviously better than the second. The rushed version is still going to look like pizza and have some nutritional value, but it certainly won't taste the same - and that's just a pizza.

Football is a tad more complicated, but both are much better if you give them enough time to properly prepare.

It's still understandable that fans enjoy the Thursday nighter despite its flaws. It's another football game, it breaks up the week, and it gives you something to watch on a night previously dominated by classic shows like "Friends," "Seinfeld," "ER," and "The Office."

Television viewers have been conditioned to tune in on Thursday nights for decades, and no script-based program is better than an NFL game.

However, NFL games don't take cues from a script, and that's what we love about them. Football games contain an amazing blend of athleticism, toughness, strategy, sacrifice, and competition. They take time and effort to properly put together. Forcing teams to forego professional preparedness for the sake of giving fans something to do - and making the league more money - is dangerous, (still) insulting, and somewhat selfish on the part of the NFL and those watching.

So let's agree to wait until Sunday and kill Thursday Night Football.