The NFL has been doing the Thursday Night Season Kickoff Extravaganza for a couple of years now. I should be used to it.

But I’m not.

And John Cotey agrees, for pretty much all the right reasons:

Pro football is the scroll, the scoring updates, the switch to another game where a touchdown has just been scored.

Pro football is the halftime show, Bradshaw lauding Brett Favre for his first two quarters, Jimmy Johnson criticizing time management, James Brown and Greg Gumbel whipping us around from game to game.

Pro football is the 1 p.m. game, followed by a 4 p.m. game…

We get none of that on a Thursday. There are no highlights to report, there’s nothing to analyze, nothing to build on. In many ways, these are very same elements that plagued Monday Night Football, which had lost its timeliness to a football-exhausted nation before the kickoff.

For Monday Night Football, it was a day too late.

For Thursday night football, it’s three days too soon.