Today's appetizing parade of NFL games begins with breakfast (Packers-Lions at 9:30 a.m.), carries through lunch (Dolphins-Cowboys at 1:15 p.m.) and culminates with a Thanksgiving dinner feast (49ers-Ravens at 5:20 p.m.).
That's great entertainment for fans, but if league officials truly cared about player safety - and they clearly don't - they would not schedule any games on Thursdays.
Not even on Thanksgiving.
All this talk about the NFL's enhanced efforts to monitor and treat concussions rings hollow when teams repeatedly are forced to play on Sunday and again on Thursday. There are nine games scheduled on Thursdays this year, including today's tripleheader.
"I don't know that the body can really do that," former Raiders coach John Madden said recently on KCBS. "I'm against Thursday football. I don't think two or three days is enough to heal up.
"We talk about safety. ... Sometimes, we have to think about the bodies playing these games. And I don't think going from Sunday to Thursday is right."
It's insulting to preach player safety on one front (such as cracking down on helmet-to-helmet hits) and then arrange a schedule with no regard for players' health. Tradition might explain today's games in Detroit and Dallas, but the Thursday night package on NFL Network - seven games, from Week 10 through Week 16 - has nothing to do with tradition.
League officials need to remember the primitive nature of their sport and its brutal toll on the human body. They need to stand on the sideline and watch, up close, as abnormally massive men, running at abnormally swift speeds, collide with abnormally violent force - on play after play after play.
Madden, in a phone interview Wednesday, recalled how long it took his Raiders players to recover from games. Late in the season, they usually didn't feel normal again until Friday or Saturday.
Six teams, including the 49ers, do not have that luxury this week.
"I think it's something that has to be studied and reviewed," Madden said, speaking of Thursday games. "It has to be reviewed sooner, not later, because the next step could be a full season of Thursday night games. You can just see it coming."
Madden is co-chair of an NFL safety panel. The panel has not made an official recommendation, but he expects this issue to be discussed.
Here's one simple suggestion: Keep games to Sundays and Mondays. Period.
E-mail Ron Kroichick at rkroichick@sfchronicle.com
This article appeared on page B - 2 of the San Francisco Chronicle
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