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Then comes a three-game, three-city spree last forced upon the franchise in 2005, when they played December road games at Seattle, Jacksonville and St. In 2013, the 49ers visited Seattle in Week 2, losing 29-3 after opening their last playoff season with a home win over Green Bay.Īfter facing the Seahawks, the 49ers return home for a quick turnaround and their only prime-time game, against the Rams on Thursday night, Sept. That trek is not as logistically challenging as the Week 2 games encountered by Tomsula and Kelly. Those coaches followed each opener with an East Coast trip against a team coming off 10 days of rest the 49ers lost 43-18 at Pittsburgh in 2015 and 46-27 at Carolina last year.
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At that point, the complaints shift to we had to play on Thursday in week 2 and the teams that play the opener would get an extra bye without a Thursday game factoring in.Before that stretch, the 49ers’ first road game will come in Week 2 at division rival Seattle. The only fix is to add a week to the season and give each team an additional bye before the Thursday game. As long as that happens the NFL will continue the games for the profit. The schemes are often vanilla due to that concern and the lack of adequate time to prepare.įans typically enjoy Thursday football (excluding Thanksgiving) less than Sunday or Monday games but they still watch because it happens to be on. While there may be a slightly increased risk (as shown this year) it is somewhat mitigated due to teams just trying to escape without further injury. The games themselves are not quality football. How many players can’t/don’t play on Thursday because they are not healed from the Sunday game but would likely play if given the missing 3 days of recovery? The issue is playing a game with less time to heal from the last one. They will surely see this as a data point in their favor.Ī study published by the league found that there were 6.9 injuries per game on Thursdays in 2017, while there were 6.3 injuries per game on other days of the week. Players, however, have been vocal that they don’t like Thursday games. That said, again coming up to the Combine, we are going to continue looking at and analyzing these data to understand what the impact of intervals between games and rest is with focus on Thursday night in a broader context.” The difference was not statistically significant. “The four-year aggregate rates are the strongest metrics due to the small number of games played on Thursdays and in general when we look at these rates, so the one-year sample size of the Thursday data is more variable. “This season, for the first time, we saw a one-year shift, where injury rates on Thursdays were slightly higher than games played on Saturday, Sunday, and Monday,” Mack said. Christina Mack, an epidemiologist who works with the league on injury data, said an uptick in injuries on Thursdays in 2017 should not be viewed as more meaningful than the years of research the NFL has that more players are injured on other days of the week. That’s a reversal from past years, when the league said there were actually fewer injuries in Thursday games.ĭr. Now the NFL is acknowledging that in 2017, players really did suffer more injuries per game on Thursdays than on other days of the week.īut the NFL says that difference was slight, not statistically significant and not indicative of a trend that would justify canceling Thursday Night Football.Ī study published by the league found that there were 6.9 injuries per game on Thursdays in 2017, while there were 6.3 injuries per game on other days of the week. For years, players have been saying Thursday games are more dangerous, while the NFL has been saying the injury data doesn’t support the players’ assertion.