NFL tries to cheer us up with misleading stat about Thursday games

This week’s edition of “Thursday Night Football’ was pretty unwatchable, a 42-10 Green Bay victory over Minnesota.

Last week’s game was pretty bad too -- 45-14, New York Giants over Washington. Same goes for Atlanta’s 56-14 rout of the Buccaneers the previous week and Baltimore’s 26-6 win over Pittsburgh.

That takes us back to the first game of the season, in which Seattle beat Green Bay, 36-16, on a special edition of “Sunday Night Football” played on Thursday night.

Noticing a trend? Yep, Thursday games are pretty awful.

That is, unless you look at the big picture, which is what the NFL wants us to do.

The really big picture.

Michael Signora, the league’s vice president of football communications, tweeted out this helpful stat Friday morning: “Since 2006, the average margin of victory in Thursday games is 13.6 points. In non-Thursday games, 12 points.”

Thanks, dude. I’m sure it makes everyone who suffered through a 32-point blowout some 12 hours earlier feel a whole lot better that you had to go all the way back eight years to get a number as low as 13.6 (which really isn’t that low).

Of course, Signora didn’t mention that there’s way more non-Thursday games, so naturally there’s going to be a lot of non-competitive games mixed in with plenty of exciting ones as well each and every week. Plus, if you happen to be watching a lousy game on a Sunday, you can always switch over to a better one (or hopefully the network will do it for those who don’t have Sunday Ticket).

The fact that there’s just one Thursday game a week (except for Thanksgiving) and that the average margin of victory is that high is not something I’d be bragging about. Especially since that number has been way worse this year -- an average margin of victory of 29 points (or 31 if you count only the four official “TNF” games), with the lowest all year being 20.

But that’s for us fans to worry about. Pretty sure the main numbers the NFL cares about are the weekly ratings, which are up more than 50% on CBS this season compared to last year on the NFL Network.

Twitter: @chewkiii