It’s not that shocking - a 5:30 pm kickoff on a Thursday night in Silicon Valley is madness. Most people with season tickets (I’m one) are either still at work or driving home from work in heavy traffic. The entire idea of Thursday night games is asinine - teams haven’t had enough time to recover from the previous Sunday and the quality of play is obviously worse. Also, because the NFL and the network want the premium games for Sunday, Thursday night gets terrible matchups like 49ers-Rams.
And yet despite the “terrible match-up”, it was one of the more entertaining games so far this season.
I absolutely agree with you about the length of time between Sunday and Thursday and how ridiculous it is to schedule games where teams only have 3 days of recovery and preparation. The NFL SAYS all kinds of wonderful things about player safety and then DOES things like TNF. They ought to reduce TNF to not have any before the bye season. Then you could schedule TNF between two teams that had their byes the previous Sunday, so proper game planning can be done and the players are relatively fresh and healthy...