In the NFL, players have often dreaded the idea of playing football in a Thursday Night Football game. Thursday games have been notoriously alleged of being a harbinger of bad news to players’ health. For one, these games come after a short rest, when participating teams are still fresh off playing on a Sunday. According to David Michael Smith of Pro Football Talk, the NFL does have the data (from NFL.com) to back up players’ claims of Thursday Night Football games being more dangerous than games played on other days – at least during the 2017 season.

A study published by the league found that there were 6.9 injuries per game on Thursdays in 2017, while there were 6.3 injuries per game on other days of the week. That’s a reversal from past years, when the league said there were actually fewer injuries in Thursday games.

Even with this result, the NFL is not going to take a step back from continuing to schedule Thursday games.

Dr. Christina Mack, an epidemiologist who works with the league on injury data, said an uptick in injuries on Thursdays in 2017 should not be viewed as more meaningful than the years of research the NFL has that more players are injured on other days of the week.

“This season, for the first time, we saw a one-year shift, where injury rates on Thursdays were slightly higher than games played on Saturday, Sunday, and Monday,” Mack said. “The four-year aggregate rates are the strongest metrics due to the small number of games played on Thursdays and in general when we look at these rates, so the one-year sample size of the Thursday data is more variable. The difference was not statistically significant. That said, again coming up to the Combine, we are going to continue looking at and analyzing these data to understand what the impact of intervals between games and rest is with focus on Thursday night in a broader context.”

To give context to what Mack spoke about, injuries to players during Thursdays are still less frequent than those that occur during other days of the week when set in the backdrop of a four-season span from 2014-2017. During that stretch, the injury rate on Thursday games is at 5.7 percent, lower than the 6.7 percent clip for Saturday, Sunday, and Monday games.