November 18, 2007

West Coast Guest Post

One can never complain enough about the byzantine NFL television rules. This comes from Michael Prodanovich in Santa Barbara, CA:

So today on the beautiful central coast of California we had a Fox doubleheader (Carolina at Green Bay at 10am PST, followed by Washington at Dallas at 1:15 PST)...and our CBS game was San Diego at Jacksonville at 10am in the early slot. Well, the SD/Jax game was a pretty good one, and ended shortly before 1pm. At that point, CBS immediately shuttled us off to bonus coverage of the final drive of the Oakland/Minnesota game, and after that promptly to the end of the Cleveland/Baltimore game, which picked up with about 3:00 remaining. Well, when the Browns and Ravens hit the 2 minute warning, they came back from commercial not to the game, but to the CBS studios. Since it was a Fox Double-header week, CBS is prohibited from even showing bonus coverage past 1:15pm, or the kickoff time for the designated Fox game in that time slot. CBS could only show the end of the Ravens game if that was our originally designated game (which, here, was SD/Jax). So instead of being able to actually SEE how the miraculous last two minutes (and OT) unfolded, we had a close-up of Dan Marino's facial expressions as he told us what happened, followed by a replay about 10 seconds after the fact. How ridiculous. Not only does the NFL only allow DirecTV customers to get NFL ticket and choose the games to see (and making the price for it 8 times higher in the process), and not only to they restrict viewers from being able to watch two games in each time slot...but they go as far as to restrict bonus covered from the end of a great and exciting game ON ANOTHER NETWORK from the one designated to broadcast the local game in that time slot. Absolutely unbelievable. And if I were to move a couple hours down to Ensenada, Mexico, I could see all of any game I want for just a few Pesos on my local cable carrier.

2 Responses:

Brien said...

I've actually been meaning to do a post on how stupid the NFL TV rules are. The whole issue of limits on the bonus coverage is a major source of irritation, but for me the main problem is that I can't see 4 afternoon games.

Why doesn't the NFL let both CBS and FOX show an early and a late game every weekend? And why can't a game be shown opposite the local game? Clearly both networks would prefer to show a double header every weekend in every market, right? And clearly the NFL would like to have more games on TV, right? Only Direct TV gets hurt, and really, it's only one (sometimes 2) more games, it's not like the NFL is doing something crazy like making every game available to everyone.

michael said...

Regarding Brien's second paragraph above, I couldnt have said it better myself. I could rant for a few hours on it...but not say it any better.

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