Maybe someone smarter than me can interpret this, because I’m not understanding how they came to their conclusion. According to this study, the average number of injuries during Sunday games was 21.4 compared to Thursday games at 21.7 but the difference is “negligible”. I feel like they didn’t take into account the fact only one game is played on fewer Thursdays, as opposed to the majority of games taking place every Sunday.
Link to study: http://www.fortunejournals.com/articles/the-effect-of-thursday-night-football-on-injuries-in.pdf
That’s interesting for explaining a slightly lower difference, but I think the big takeaway is that they’re roughly equal. The claim has been that short weeks clearly and obviously lead to more injuries, and it seems like this shows that’s simply not the case.
Maybe it has a cumulative effect, like if teams played 7-8 games a year on short rest while others only played 1-2, but that doesn’t happen, and there’s no way to measure it because they’ve mostly balanced the Mon/Thurs games.