Idiots Write About Sports

Apart from a mild affection for the San Diego Chargers, my interest in professional football is largely limited to a financial one — as in, will the players I selected for my fantasy football team lead me to glorious victory this week so I don’t have to spend the next seven days eating Alpo to stay alive. But let’s pretend for a moment that the bright sun of my sporting life actually rose and set at the NFL’s say-so. Let’s say that I’m a guy with more than a passing interest in professional football. Let’s pretend that there’s nothing more I enjoy than sitting down on a Sunday afternoon and watching a game of football.

Well, the NFL, with its fan-unfriendly TV policies, seems to be doing everything in its power to cure me of that particular theoretical interest.

I live in the Bay Area, home to two terrible football teams. Both of those terrible football teams are mandated to appear on two of the three games that are shown on network television each Sunday; in fact, most of the time, that third game never appears on my TV, owing to the NFL’s quaint rule that no other game can be shown opposite of a home telecast. Adding to our woes is the fact that one of the terrible teams in this region — the terrible one in Oakland, not the terrible one in San Francisco — can’t sell out its home games, thanks to a combination of high ticket prices, a sinister owner, and a small-yet-nevertheless-determined segment of the fan base that indulges in mayhem and psychosis. Sometimes this works to our advantage and we are shown a good football game instead of another lousy Raider telecast; oftentimes, it does not.

As an example, here’s what I have to look forward to from my friends at the NFL.

• At 10 a.m., the truly awful San Francisco 49ers will take on the just-as-woeful Tennessee Titans in a game of interest to no one outside of the players’ immediate families.

• At 1 p.m., we would normally be treated to the Oakland Raiders going through the motions against an uninspiring squadron from Miami. However, because East Bay sports fans are savvy enough not to pay $67 a head to watch two mediocrities duke it out, the game will be blacked out. Instead, we’re getting CBS’s alternate game — Jacksonville vs. Arizona in a classic battle of indifference. I should also mention that the Raiders’ home game means we won’t be seeing the second-half of Fox’s doubleheader, thus depriving the Bay Area a chance to watch teams that might actually be playing deep into January.

• Well, at least there’s the ESPN game, right? Let’s see, that one features… New Orleans and the New York Jets? Great.

What can one say to a lineup like that? Other than, “I think I have some yard work I need to take care of?”

Yeah, yeah, if I want to have my choice of football games, I should pony up for The NFL Sunday Ticket. But to order that, I’d also need to pay up for satellite TV since the NFL is the only one of the four major sports that doesn’t make its television package available to cable subscribers. Even Major League Baseball, which often treats television as a necessary evil, has figured this one out.

If I were more of a football fan, then maybe I’d be inspired to go the Sunday Ticket route. But I’m not — I’m a casual fan. And all the NFL’s TV policy is inspiring me to do is watch less football.

I’m hardly alone. I just moved out of a city where the majority of the populace is perfectly happy to go through life without a football team if it means having three decent games on the tube each week. Dismiss me as an indifferent crank if you must, but when you’ve lost the second-largest market in the country, I have to wonder just how well you’re running your sport.

I could not agree more with you here. As a die-hard Chargers fan living in Oakland, I fully understand that the local market fans want to watch their teams. I have sat through more than a few Raiders and 9ers games when I'd rather have watched something else, and I understand the rationale. But it boggles my mind that these would be the only two games the NFL shows in the area. We can't get a second game on one of these two channels? Why does CBS and Fox show stuff no one in the world would watch instead of a second football game?

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