Thursday Night Football has been called a lot of different things by a lot of different people. Seahawks cornerback Richard Sherman coined a new term for it on Wednesday, via Sheil Kapadia of ESPN.com.
“Poopfest,” Sherman said.
“It’s terrible,” he added. “We got home like 1:00 in the morning, something like that on Monday and then you’ve got to play again. Congratulations, NFL, you did it again. But they’ve been doing it all season, so I guess we’re the last ones to get the middle finger.”
Actually, the last ones to get the middle finger will be the Giants and Eagles, next Thursday night. So the Seahawks and Rams get the penultimate appendage.
In the official transcript of his press conference (which surprisingly omitted “poopfest”), Sherman addressed where Thursday Night Football ranks on the things he doesn’t like about the NFL.
“It’s pretty high, top five,” Sherman said. “It’s just no regard, its hypocritical, as I’ve stated before. They make this huge stance about player safety and then they put the players in tremendous danger.”
Sherman acknowledged that nothing can be done about it because the players collectively agreed to it. But he promised that they’ll be on the alert for other potential problems in the future.
“The league probably has something else up their sleeve. They might have a Friday night game planned. Who knows?”
They won’t have a Friday night game on the schedule between early September and early December, in order to preserve the NFL’s broadcast antitrust exemption. Beyond that, anything is on the table — regardless of whether individual players may dub it a “poopfest” or worse.