Thursday Night Football

The weekly disaster known as Thursday Night Football hits either a new high or a new low – it depends on your perspective.

If you thought it couldn’t get any worse – bad matchups of teams on short rest – it can. Ladies and gentlemen, the 0-9 Cleveland Browns are playing the 4-4 Baltimore Ravens.

The Ravens have won only once in their last five games. The Browns? Well, 0-9 speaks for itself and matches the worst opening to a season in their history (1975). But it can speak louder. The Browns have lost 12 in a row dating to last season and 19 of their last 20.

They are, of course, in last place in the AFC North. The Ravens, average as they are, are tied for first place with the Pittsburgh Steelers. So this is obviously not a game the Ravens can overlook, since it should be a gimme (even though they trailed the Browns 20-0 in Week 2 and then beat them 25-20).

“When you’re a team that’s in front of the division — and with how the outside world looks at it — if the Ravens lose this game, it just looks bad,” quarterback Joe Flacco said. “It looks bad because we lost to a team that doesn’t have any wins. That’s the reality of it. It just doesn’t look good.”

It just doesn’t look good. Say it again.

Unfortunately, none of these Thursday night games look good because the teams can barely prepare for them. And the Ravens will be completely suited up in purple as part of the NFL’s Color Rush uniform scheme that causes eyeballs to seize up and crack. There’s no way to look good when forced to look bad.

That said, enjoy the game. It will be something to see, but not much to look at.
 
 
Post By: Larry Weisman, a longtime sportswriter for USA TODAY, blogs for Twistity.com. Follow him on Twitter @MrLarryWeisman