Ranking 2024's Thursday Night Football NFL games in order of their inherent 'Thursday'-ness (hello, Sean Payton)
Traditionally, Thursday nights are not must see television for NFL fans.
Certainly, the annual season opener is worth watching. There are always a handful of pivotal divisional showdowns and matchups that reverberate through the playoff seeding. But, historically, mid-week has been where the NFL puts the games too ugly even to ship out to London. It’s where, reliably, you’ll find more teams battling for a top 10 draft pick than a Super Bowl ring. It’s where the Jacksonville Jaguars summed up all our thoughts on the matter by wearing the ugliest Color Rush uniforms known to mankind.
Like with the league’s International Series, the lineup has improved recently. Amazon isn’t paying a premium to be the home of Bryce Young underthrows and whatever Mac Jones is up to every Thursday. But the past dies hard, and throwbacks to the NFL’s experimental era — a stretch that proved, yes, fans will in fact watch anything on any given day as long as it’s high level football — persist.
Let’s talk about those games; the ones we’ll begrudgingly watch on a cold November night because broadcast television is dying and you can always finish binging old episodes of Bojack Horseman later. These are this year’s Thursday Night Football games, ranked by how “TNF” they are.