Todays Estimate Reading Time: 3 minutes and 7 seconds

Good Morning, this is the Daily Breakroom. We’ve got four topics today and we’re going to try to do each in less than a minute.

Here’s what we got:

• Thursday Night Football News

• Valero Texas Open

• Minor League Pay Increase

• Longest NBA Playoff Drought

Let’s go

Thursday Night Football News

The NFL is obsessed with making Thursday Night football work. Even though these games are usually nightmares to watch, it was recently announced that teams can have max two TNF games in a season now. Players weren’t happy about this TNF announcement as they only get 3 days to recover before game day. The NFL claims there is no increase in risk of injury to the players and as a bonus the players get 10 days of rest after a Thursday night game. We’ll get into that after you check out this tweet from retired JJ Watt who makes two good points.

Let’s Dig Into The Injury Stats

We don’t have the dataset or the actual analysis but we have some results from a 2017 study that showed that games played on short rest(4 days) had the lowest injury incident of 1.26 injuries a game. Regular rest (6-8 days) had 1.53 injuries and long rest (10+ days) had 1.34 injuries. We’re curious what would happen if they stratified the long rest group into two groups, one coming off a normal bye week and the other coming off of the long rest that you get from playing a TNF game. Our question is, are players more likely to get injured in the weeks following a Thursday night game?

We might never know, but as long this is good business for the NFL and Amazon, things aren’t going to change.

Valero Texas Open

The Valero Texas Open tees of at 8:30am today at TPC San Antonio and this tournament is feeling the schedule pinch. The Texas Open isn’t drawing the big names that it might have in the past as other PGA Tour events like last week’s Dell Match Play was a designated event with a big purse. It doesn’t help the Texas Open that next week is Masters week either. Top players take a few days off at home to refresh and get to Augusta early to get settled in.

This should still be a competitive weekend as you have golfers Tyrell Hatton, Hideki Matsuyama and even Rickie Fowler playing. Rickie will need to win outright to secure a Masters spot. You can follow along all day on ESPN+ and then the GOLF Channel at 4pm

Minor League Baseball Just Got a Raise

After years of litigation and negotiation, Minor League Baseball players just got a big win. As part of a new collective bargaining agreement (CBA) players in Single A, Double A, and the Triple A’s will all be practically doubling their salaries. They will also get paid over a 46 week period. The minors have been grueling work for years as players sometimes have to work other jobs, live with random families, or find cheap housing just to make it through a season. Here’s more on the salaries.

Longest NBA Playoff Drought Broken

The Sacramento Kings have broken a 16 year playoff drought and have become the newest team to clinch an NBA playoff berth. They ended the drought with a 120-80 win over the Portland Trailblazers on Wednesday night. Wondering who was on the Kings the last time they made the playoffs? You had players like Mike Bibby, Bonzi Wells, and Metta World Peace.

The Kings have had some defensive woes this year. We’ll see how they fare in the postseason. Congrats to them and hopefully the players and the city enjoy this for the next few weeks.

Happy Thursday, we’ll catch up with you tomorrow.

-The Daily Breakroom Team