The NFL should be embarrassed by what it put on the field last night.

Flag. Injury. Flag. Injury. Ref carted off the field. Flag. Injury.

Rinse & repeat!

The TNF product has, once again, become unwatchable.

Look, I love football. If it were possible, I’d watch it seven days out of the week. Hell, it actually is possible this time of year with MACtion bridging the midweek gap.

But, at some point, it just becomes a slog. That’s what Thursday Night Football has become for the NFL. I know this is a tired argument, which is why I really don’t love making it. I’m not reinventing the wheel here. This isn’t some hot take. It’s been made before, and it’ll be made again.

Still, last night’s game between Buffalo and Houston was just pathetic. The game itself was fine. Dramatic ending. Texans won. Josh Allen got sacked 14 billion times. Good stuff. I hit on a bet for once, so that was nice.

If you watched the whole thing, though, you HAD to be thinking the same thing I was – especially in the third quarter, when there were 14 commercial breaks for injured players. Seriously. It was one after another. At one point, we lost a ref to what looked like a ruptured achilles. Seriously.

And when the game wasn’t bogged down with injuries, it was the penalties. Flag after flag after flag after flag. Al Michaels was disgusted. You could hear it in his voice. The third quarter took an hour to play. It was brutal.

It’s just become too much. It’s become unwatchable, frankly:

What does the NFL do, if anything?

I could go on and on. Seriously. People have had enough. THAT’s how bad the game was last night. At one point – and I’m not exaggerating – a Bills player was so injured he literally left the game and returned to the sidelines in a sling 15 minutes later.

A sling!

It was absurd. The game was actually good, but you could never, ever, get into any sort of rhythm with it because of the injuries. Or the flags. Or a ref tearing an ACL. It was insane.

And I get it. Football is a violent sport. Players get hurt all the time. They have six months off, and some get hurt in the first quarter of Week 1. But come on. Last night was embarrassing. The NFL knows it, and they don’t care. Duh. They see it.

Hell, Al and Kirk saw it last night and didn’t say a word. They have a stake in this, too. It’s all about the money. And I get it. There is a lot of money invested into TNF and Amazon Prime, and it ain’t going anywhere, any time soon.

But my God. There has to be SOMETHING the league can do so there isn’t a literal LINE forming at the blue medical tent every week. My best suggestion? Don’t start TNF until October, when the bye weeks start, and then just have teams coming off a bye play on Thursdays for the rest of the season.

That seems reasonable, and doable. I think. I don’t know. I don’t get paid enough to break down how the NFL schedule works. But that, to me, sounds like a possible fix.

The NFL has watered down the kickoff for “player safety,” and now it looks like a pee-wee game. The NFL will not allow defenders to lay a finger on the QB anymore because of “player safety.” The NFL is so concerned about concussions that we now have players wearing condoms over their helmets … for “player safety.”

Everything is about “player safety,” until you get to a Thursday night. Then all bets are off, and the place looks like a nursing home by halftime.

Oh well. I’ll still watch, of course. So will you.

That’s America, I reckon.